What does it mean that strength of relationships varies?

Not all connections are equally strong — quantifying strength improves your model.

Example: In 1973, Mark Granovetter surveyed 282 men in the Boston area about how they found their jobs. The result upended conventional thinking about relationships. Most job leads didn't come from close friends or family — the people with the strongest ties to the job seeker. They came from acquaintances: people the job seeker saw occasionally or rarely. Granovetter called this 'the strength of weak ties.' The finding wasn't that weak ties are better than strong ties in some absolute sense. It was that the strength of a tie determines what it can do for you. Strong ties provide emotional support, trust, and reliability. Weak ties provide novel information, bridge access to distant clusters, and exposure to opportunities your close circle would never surface. A relationship map that treats all connections as equal misses this entirely. It's the difference between knowing you have 500 LinkedIn connections and knowing which 12 of those connections actually move information that matters to your career.

Try this: Pick a domain where you maintain relationships — your professional network, your knowledge base, your project dependencies, your personal contacts. List ten relationships in that domain. Now assign each one a strength score from 1 (weakest) to 5 (strongest) based on explicit criteria you define. For social relationships, Granovetter suggested four dimensions: time invested, emotional intensity, mutual confiding, and reciprocal services. For knowledge relationships, you might use: frequency of reference, confidence in the connection, depth of evidence, and practical impact. After scoring, identify: (1) the strongest relationship that you've been underinvesting in, (2) the weakest relationship that might be a valuable bridge to new information, and (3) two relationships whose strength you assumed was equal but that your scoring reveals are quite different.