By Nilesh Bhagat, CHRP

I know Kevin Bacon. Well… not personally, but I bet I know a person, who knows a person, who knows Kevin Bacon. That’s the world we live in and, better yet, will experience as the walls of separation between people start to crumble. Thank the internet; thank the new philosophies of openness, peering, sharing and collaboration; or thank your Aunt Ruth, whose friend’s sister played a cameo in Apollo 13. In any case, the world we live in is becoming more connected because we have the capabilities in place to share with each other more experiences than ever before.

I want to talk about six degrees of separation and how that’s becoming fewer. I read in Duncan Watt’s Six Degrees that there are different kinds of networks that almost every living (and non-living) thing on earth belongs to. The type of network that interests me is called a ‘small world network’. We’re all familiar with these types of networks: they’re the kinds that allow us to connect with a specific idea or person through the people we have established relationships with. Small world network searches are based upon the experiences we share with one another; that is, when we’re looking for a certain someone, we can connect with them in six degrees or less because we think about the context that the search entails. For example, if you’re looking to connect with your favorite Olympic athlete, the context becomes sports/sporting events/sporting experiences and this is used to focus your search in terms of the groups of people you connect with to find the athlete. Of course contexts are just things like time, space, temperature, and physical surroundings, which are the elements needed to create experiences. Taken further, the more contexts we find ourselves, the more diverse our networks become because we are exposed to more experiences to share in, which help us to find more people and in fewer degrees.

Let’s separate ‘experiences’ into three groups – real world, virtual world, and the new and soon to be ubiquitous augmented world (which is the fusion of real and virtual worlds). If we take into account how these types of experiences are available to more people than ever before and have become normative in use for a certain emerging demographic (ahem, the Net Geners), we can say that the experiences we’re able to share have become more and richer. This means that we have an easier time connecting to those who we want to connect to in our worlds, effectively making them smaller than ever. Smaller than six degrees anyway…

So how does this affect business and HR?

As we move to an ever-more collaborative and open business era, specialization becomes important. People with specific skills, abilities and knowledge are sought after to solve the challenges that arise in our organizations. Want to help your organization connect to the tech-savvy demographic using Facebook, Twitter and other social media streams? There’s a specialist for that. Want to teach your crew how online tools in the Cloud can help to increase learning, sharing and knowledge transfer? There’s a specialist for that. We’re evolving into an open and collaborative world of human capital where we can find and connect with people with almost any type of specialty we seek, to solve almost any type of problem that comes at us. This is all possible because we have at our disposal technology and tools to augment the ways we connect and experience life with each other.

How are you crumbling the walls of separation in your organization?

Nilesh Bhagat, CHRP, is the membership and CHRP administrator at BC HRMA. After several grueling years in school, Nilesh graduated in October 2010 from Simon Fraser University with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, First Class Honors. He majored in Human Resources Management and tacked on an extended minor in Psychology. He’s a self-confessed nerd (the first step is admitting), likes to read, loves hockey and is struggling with the complexities of learning the game of golf.