Getting from there to here
On never eating alone
In May of 2020 I took part in a ‘Social Salon’, organized by the folks at TEDxAsburyPark. For the last nine years, TEDxAsburyPark has brought together people from the NY-NJ-CT metro area and had them engage in the usual TED conference-style of, er, conferencing … I was invited to contribute some thoughts related to the topic of Joy. I decided to draft up a talk with the tentative title ‘The Joy of Random Connections’, which would have at its core my experience as co-founder of Lunch Roulette.
As you might guess from its name, Lunch Roulette is a simple tool to randomly connect people. Over the years we’ve used it to connect a lot of people, in a lot of organizations, across a lot of industries.
Quite a bit has been written about Lunch Roulette both by us and by others, and ours is by no means the only version that’s ever existed or currently exists. For instance, here’s a nice description of the tool that Kickstarter implemented in 2014 (this post contains not only a link to their Git repo for the code, but also some thoughts on the underlying mathematics. It was this post that introduced me to the problème des ménages and was recently the focus of a Netlix Original Movie - Love. Marriage. Repeat … my own mathematical diversion related to their work, and originally posted on the now defunct Lunch Roulette blog is, I’m afraid, lost forever …)
Unsurprisingly, the general problem these apps address live on, and a quick Google search surfaces the most recent iteration of the Lunch Roulette ‘solution’ as Slack apps, see for instance here and here.
While we formally shuttered Lunch Roulette last year, it lives on through my continued work in Engineered Randomness. I’ve articulated this here as a Project. Together, these Projects reflect things I’ve thought about and contributed to, and/or continue to work on in some form or other. As I wrote before, one of my goals for this current site is to try and better articulate how all of these threads fit together.
So, here goes, here’s the story of how Lunch Roulette informed one of my biggest projects (and one still ongoing), the founding of interstitio.
it’s all just Edges and nodes
As our work with Lunch Roulette grew, we quickly came to believe that people’s participation in it was working to re-connect organizations, and we looked to try and find a language and tools that would help us understand this.
At some level we knew we were thinking about organizations as ‘graphs’ (collections of edges and nodes - where the ‘nodes’ are the people, and the ‘edges’ are their connections / relationships etc.), and a quick Google search introduced us to the concept of Organizational Network Analysis (ONA). In a surprisingly short time, we had brokered an introduction to an ONA specialist who was then working at the S. C. Johnson College of Business at Cornell University. It was through our collaboration with this person that introduced Eric Gladstone and I and, as we talked over the years, the seed for interstitio was planted. This wasn’t the only outcome, we had a host of research outputs that resulted from this (and similar) social science collaborations.
Much of what we do at interstitio is grounded in our understanding of the organization through the lens of ONA (see the ‘What is ONA’ section of our website to learn more), and it’s this language and associated tools that help us help organizations who are wrestling with their own complex problems.
When thought about like this, Lunch Roulette becomes a very specific ‘graph-based’ intervention to solve the problem of poor communication / collaboration within an organizational context. Looking at it like this, interstitio represents a broader, more general toolbox of ‘graph-based’ approaches we can bring to bear in the service of any issue you might be facing.
So, there you have it. That’s how we go from there to here.
