Speed Networking

Opportunities rarely just fall into your lap. You’ve got to go out and look for them. To paraphrase an excellent piece of advice I was given during a Screenwriting workshop in Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago:

“Wake up to the fact that that telephone call is never going to come. You know – the one that goes: ‘Erica! Erica! Thank goodness you’re at home! The entire writing crew of the BBC Drama Department has gone down with a nasty bug! We’ve been hearing you do a bit of writing – can you come down and save the day?’”

Life, unless you happen to be Ricky Gervais, doesn’t work like that. So, if you want to advance your career, you’ve got to get out there and network.

And I don’t much care for networking. It brings out the thrawn Highlander in me, along with an uncomfortable suspicion of being a bit long in the tooth to be doing that sort of thing anyway. It feels strange, not quite genuine: calculating, even.

Chatting? Oh, yes. But networking? Um, how does that go, please?

Plunging into a room full of strangers, wearing a name badge and a fixed smile, nursing a glass of warm white wine and a hidden agenda – since when was that easy? Or fun?

All of a sudden you’re five years old again but the person nudging you forwards, gently yet forcibly, to go and make new friends isn’t your mum any more, it’s an events facilitator with one eye on the clock and another on the dwindling levels in the warm wine-boxes.

Most of us are biblically bad at it. We latch onto the person whom we encounter first, the one hovering beside the table with the stained tablecloth and those warm white wine-boxes, and we don’t have the room-working skills to let them go until the staff need to set up for breakfast, or the building catches fire, or Doomsday happens.

Having said that, there’s nothing wrong with the principle of networking. Okay, there is – there’s the word, for a start, it’s right up there with ‘feedback’ and ‘solutions’ and ‘available’ and ‘roll-out’ on my Most Unwanted list but for the purposes of this piece and for one week only I’m talking about the act, rather than the word.

Then it occurred to me: networking is a bit like speed-dating, isn’t it? Not that I’ve ever been speed-dating but I’ve read enough chick-lit on the subject to have a fair idea how it works. Everyone’s there with high hopes of achieving an unlikely, though not impossible outcome and only one or two will go home with their hopes fulfilled. The rest will live to network another day; a little wiser, maybe; a little more wary than before.
So, in order not to waste the speed-dating analogy, here’s a suggestion for how to organise a networking event.

It’s designed along the speed-dating principle and it would go like this:

1. The word ‘networking’ would be banned.
2. So would warm white wine.
3. Also out - any suggestion that it’s a social event. This is business. It would take place during the day, for a start, so as not to cut into precious evening time with family and friends.
4. The event would be split in two. Firstly, everyone takes a number, a notebook, and a pen.
5. Then everyone takes their turn to stand up and say who they are, what they do and what information they’re looking to get out of the event. About 40 seconds each should do it.
6. The others all make notes.
7. When everyone is finished, participants head for the person or people who may be of use to them.
   At last, it’s speed-networking time. Name, rank, serial number, business card – all exchanged within a five minute slot, with a little bell denoting when it’s time to shake hands and move on.

Everyone stays in control and the job’s done in half the time. And like speed-dating, all of the interesting, sociable bits could happen at a later date. Wonder if I could persuade Ricky Gervais to come along?