Networking relationships. – Why not Quality AND Quantity?

Recently I’ve seen a load of posts about quality versus quantity, mainly people saying they prefer a small number of quality relationships over a large number of looser relationships.

Whilst it is always personal choice, I just wonder why we can’t do both? Have a big extended network, and our smaller, more intimate connections.

The way I always explain it, is that our network is like a load of concentric circles. People, unless they are genetically related to us, tend to start off in the outer circles. We’ve either met them, or connected online, but we don’t yet know them. Some people stay in those outer circles, as acquaintances, and that’s cool.

Those people who move closer to us, or us to them, become our Dunbar’s number (I wrote about it in Business Networking for Dummies). Dunbar’s number is those 150 or so people who you would join, uninvited, for a drink, if you bumped into them in a bar. Dunbar theorised that there was a maximum number of people one human could maintain friendships with, and that number was apparently around 150. Some people in that circle will come and go, move closer to us, drift away, our working situation changes so that we aren’t as in touch anymore, that sort of thing.

Right inside that, there’s our inner circle. Those people who we pick up the ‘phone to when we want to…