How Great Work Moves Through Real Relationships

A few years ago, a client told me a story that has stayed with me.

She had spent months telling everyone closest to her about a talk she wanted to bring into corporations. It focused on navigating complexity without burnout, aimed at organizations trying to find their footing as they emerged from the pandemic. Less chaos, more clarity. Less pressure, more trust.

She talked about it with close friends. Longtime collaborators. People who knew her work well and believed in it.

Nothing happened.

Then one afternoon, she struck up a casual conversation with a woman on the train. Not a pitch. Just the kind of polite exchange you have when you’re sharing a commute.

The woman asked what she was working on. My client answered briefly.

She paused and said, “I might know someone this would be useful for. Would you be open to an introduction?”

My client said yes and shared her email.

A week later, a message arrived. An introduction to a senior leader at a company struggling with exactly the problem she had been naming. The conversation led somewhere real.

It felt surprising, but it wasn’t random.

Once you start noticing this pattern, you see it everywhere. In work, and in how ideas, opportunities, and recognition move through the world.

Where Opportunities Appear

Social Network Theory looks at how information, ideas, and opportunities move through groups of people over time.

One of its most established observations is that new opportunities tend to appear away from the center of a network.

They show up at the edges.

Through acquaintances. Through people you know just well enough to talk with. Through people who move through worlds you don’t regularly enter.

Close relationships still matter deeply. They shape and sustain the work. They also operate within shared context.

Once you see how different connections function, many confusing experiences begin to make sense.

Why Strong Ties Circulate Ideas Instead of Extending Them

Strong ties are the people closest to you. Friends. Family. Collaborators. Colleagues you work with regularly.

They know your work well. They care about what you’re building. Many people doing Great Work are supported by these relationships.

Strong ties tend to share context.

They move through the same circles you do. They know the same people, hear the same conversations, and encounter the same references. When you share your work with them, it often moves quickly and thoroughly within that shared world.

This circulation plays an important role.

Strong ties stabilize your work. They support depth. They help you keep going over time. Their contribution shows up as continuity rather than expansion.

What Weak Ties Do Differently

Weak ties sit at the edges of your network.

They are acquaintances, former colleagues, and people you’ve crossed paths with but don’t know well. They aren’t deeply familiar with your work. They aren’t involved in your day-to-day progress.

That distance changes what they encounter.

Weak ties move through different circles. They hear different conversations. They come across needs and openings that never reach your immediate environment.

This is why social network research pays so much attention to weak ties.

Weak ties surface opportunities by connecting parts of a network that would otherwise remain separate. They allow your work to appear in places you haven’t been and conversations you haven’t heard.

They are one of the primary ways novelty enters a system.

Where the Insight Starts to Strain

Once people understand that weak ties matter, they often try to act on that knowledge.

They look outward. They think about people they barely know. They consider reaching out. They open a blank message and begin drafting.

And then they pause.

What emerges in that moment is rarely confusion about the theory. The insight makes sense.

It’s also not a shortage of words. Most people can describe their work when asked.

What shows up instead is a sense of misalignment. The move being considered does not feel congruent with the work itself or with the kind of relationships it depends on.

People recognize that opportunity lives at the edges. They also recognize that meaningful work travels through understanding.

That awareness slows them down.

This pause often gets interpreted as hesitation or avoidance. In practice, it functions as discernment.

People are registering that something important has not yet been named.

The Missing Layer Between Opportunity and Movement

Weak ties surface opportunity. They show where something might be possible.

Movement requires additional conditions.

Opportunities tend to progress when someone can recognize the work, place it accurately, and speak about it with ease. That level of understanding develops through familiarity over time.

This doesn’t happen only at the edges.

It emerges in the middle.

This middle layer (called moderate ties) includes people who recognize your name, have encountered your work more than once, and understand it well enough to talk about it without effort. They aren’t deeply embedded in your daily life, and they aren’t strangers.

They are the ones who can turn a mention into a conversation. A conversation into an introduction. An opening into something real.

Seeing this layer clarifies why the earlier pause made sense.

The issue was never weak ties. The structure needed another layer.

The Middle Where Opportunity Becomes Accessible

Moderate ties are where opportunity becomes accessible through familiarity.

People here know what your work is. They know what it is not. They can describe it without strain. They don’t need a script to place it accurately.

When something relevant crosses their path, your work comes to mind as a fit.

Weak ties show where something might exist. Moderate ties support movement by making that possibility usable.

Why This Matters for Great Work

Great Work depends on trust and understanding.

It asks for context. It benefits from repetition. It moves when someone can explain it clearly to someone else.

This kind of movement grows through recognition.

When you understand the role of the middle, your attention shifts. You stop trying to force outcomes at the edges. You begin noticing whether people are becoming oriented to your work over time.

That shift changes how effort is directed.

A More Accurate Way to Think About Network Growth

When you see your network this way, the metrics change.

Attention moves away from how many people are watching and toward who recognizes your work when they encounter it again.

Reach becomes less important than understanding.

A small number of people who truly understand your work mark the beginning of a momentum that can last.

Many people underestimate what they already have because they are looking in the wrong place.

An Invitation to Look More Closely

If you want to explore how these layers function in your own network, I’m teaching a free class that looks at how ideas move through real relationships, how familiarity builds, and how to tell whether your system supports the work you want to do more of.

I’d love to see you there!