2014-04-22 18.04.41

The Friday before Easter at about 4pm we had just sat down at the kitchen table to start coloring Easter Eggs when we looked out the dining room window and saw a swarm of bees. A big swarm. Not a few bees flying around the roses – more like 20,000 bees flying in circles in the yard. It looked as I would imagine a bee cloud to look, and the buzzing was loud enough to hear out the window from a dozen feet away.  After about ten minutes the cloud started going lower and getting smaller – and they settled in a mass and proceeded to go under my son’s fort.  While I understand that underneath the floorboards of a fort would be prime real estate for a hive (protected on all sides), it is not exactly optimal for kids playing (stomping around with a bee hive under the floor?  I think not).

What to do?  I didn’t want to kill the hive if it could be avoided (colony collapse issues, and all that), so I did what seemed to me to be the logical thing – email the bee keeping society to ask what to do.

While watching the bees fly around the next morning I saw my neighbor (John) approach the fort, and quickly waved him away, explaining about the bees.  As it turns out, he was looking for the bees because he had seen the swarm.  We got talking about it, and he told me that we had a neighbor about two blocks away who is a bee guy (Ed), who perhaps could take care of them.  A half hour later I walked in the kitchen to find a different neighbor (Ray) having coffee with my mom. Apparently John had talked to Ray about the bees, and Ray immediately went to Ed’s (the bee guy) house on our behalf, and had come over to update us.  A half hour later, Ed was at our house assessing the situation.  He said not to worry, he’d take care of it.  And so he did.  Monday evening he came over with his daughter, and the two of them moved the bees into a constructed hive (primed with a honeycomb to entice the bees), and said they would take it down to an orchard in Lemon Grove which had recently lost their hive due to a colony collapse.  And on Thursday evening he came over with his son, packed up the bees, and took them away. So good news all around – the bees get a new home, the orchard gets a new hive, and my son gets his fort back.

Watching all of this (the activity of the bees and my neighbors) I was struck by the importance of networks, and the power of proactive helping.

I don’t think about networks much.  They’re part of daily life both at work and at home, but most of the time I don’t think strategically or deliberately about how I make use of them. And I should.  This is a case in point:  Instead of looking to my network for a solution, I looked to the internet.  The internet did provide a solution (numbers to call to pay people to kill the hive), but the options were suboptimal.  The more optimal solution (hive goes to an orchard that needs it, neighbors helping neighbors, gifts all around) came from my network.  The solution didn’t come because I looked for it, it came because my neighbors are proactive givers.

Which started me thinking about how we use networks at work*.  Research shows that networks are an important part of how we get our work done, and that the effective use of networks can improve our outcomes (see Developing Network Perspective).  But how frequently at work do we try to come up with the solution ourselves or look for an answer from Google rather than from our network?  It’s possible (as in this case) that solution to issues at work are quite a bit closer than the internet. And if we look for solutions within our networks we give people the opportunity to help if they can, thus strengthening our ties to each other.

Which brings me to the other thing that struck me:  How my neighbors went out of their way to find a solution by spreading the word and contacting the person who could help.  It reminded me of Adam Grant’s research on giving (see Give and Take), which shows that givers prosper.  They did what Adam talk about – they helped others simply because it was a good thing to do.  It was a good thing to do, and their giving resulted in a cascade of positive outcomes.  The initial giving of assistance to my family resulted in strengthened our relationships with our neighbors, assistance to others in a nearby community, and a more healthy ecosystem because a bee swarm was saved.

So next time something unexpected happens that I need a solution to – whether at work or at home – I’ll think about tapping into my network before tapping on my computer.

 

*To read about leadership lessons learned from bees, click here.