JTBD: The Ultimate Social Job to be Done

In the movie Castaway, Tom Hank’s character gets stranded on an uninhabited island. In his lonely and mentally desperate state, he rather strangely hired a volleyball he named Wilson to get him through his ordeal. What was the job he was hiring the ball to do?

As part of my series on Jobs to be Done I’d like to explain what I believe is THE ultimate social job and show from experience how powerful it can be if we apply it to the functional jobs we build our products for.

The JOB of social

In 2012, I witnessed something I found extraordinary; this led me on a journey of self discovery and completely transformed my career as a product manager.

I was working in Indonesia for Blackberry Messenger — their largest market, which peaked at 90 million MAU before being taken down by WhatsApp. Everyday between 12am and 6am there was almost no one online. Then at 6am (sunrise in the tropics) their largest spike of the day appeared. Tens of millions of Indonesians had woken up and immediately connected to their social network. What was the underlying force that made this behaviour so commonplace?

After some searching, I quickly came across the huge volume of work by the brilliant evolutionary psychologist Professor Robin Dunbar of Oxford University. What quickly became apparent was that if you want to understand the social behaviour of humans, you first have to understand that of primates. I have summarised this below, before I reveal what I believe to be the ultimate social job.

Why do we need friends?

It’s actually a survival strategy we inherited from primates. A group acts as a deterrent for predators, including those in their own species. However, this comes with internal challenges — as we all know it’s stressful living in groups and subject to free riders taking without giving back.

In fact, Harvard researchers were very surprised to find that the number one health and happiness indicator for humans is not their cholesterol levels or wealth, but their social network. The researchers groundbreaking 80-year study discovered that the people most satisfied in their relationships at age 50, were the healthiest at 80.

What are friendships?

Friendships are implicit social contracts that intend to share the costs of survival and reproduction. Sounds weird? Well of course that’s not how we approach it in day to day life. We are simply behaving most of the time.

How do we make friends?

Primates use reciprocal grooming to create these bonds. A light touch of the skin releases relaxing endorphins — the brain’s natural pain killer. Next time you see any monkeys or apes, just watch for a few minutes and you will likely see it in action, with some species spending up to 25% of their waking day doing just this to maintain their group stability.

Humans also create bonds using endorphin hits and spend around 20% of the day doing this, not by stroking each other naturally, but through innovative solutions. More on this later.

How many friends can I have?

One of Dunbar’s biggest discoveries was the linear relationship between brain size and maximum number of friends primates and humans can maintain. Humans have the largest brains because the more time spent out of the trees in dangerous open land, the more friends they need for protection.

It turns out humans can have around 150 friends at any one time:

Seems low? Well you simply don’t have enough capacity to manage more as each new friend requires an exponential increase in brain memory and processing as we remember our relationship with them, plus their relationship with all our other friends — that’s 11,000+ relationships. For comparison, chimpanzees — our closest living relative — reach maximum group sizes of around 50 which is a mere 1,200 relationships.

Here is a good test to see if someone is in your 150. You see them sitting at the other side of the airport lounge. You have 30 mins before your flight. Would you go say Hi! and have a conversation with that person? You know their name, but wait… what was their child’s name again? Hang on… do they even have children?

How do we organise our friendships?

We seem to fit our groups neatly into concentric circles with those closest in the centre. Moving from any inner circle to its neighbouring outer circle, the cumulative total increases by 3x (no one knows why). You also get associated exponential reductions in contact and time spent (see chart).

A chimp brain allows three circles of five, fifteen, fifty cumulative, whereas humans have added a fourth circle taking it to 150.

• Support Clique (5): The inner circle are your five core friends — two are usually family members. 40% of your social energy goes here. Write down on a piece of paper five people you would call if you got chest pains in the middle of the night or if you went bankrupt.
• Sympathy Group (15): Next ten friends who we see at least monthly and would be absolutely devastated if one of them passed away. So far these 15 are very likely to know each other.
• Affinity Group (50): Next 35 may not be that close, but can be useful sources of information. More likely to see friends here than extended family as the latter need less maintenance so in next layer.
• Active Network (150): Next 100 we only see a few times a year. We remember enough about them and their links to other friends and act as social capital.

The 500 circle we can relabel from friends to acquaintances (feature request for Facebook perhaps?). The final 1,500 are those where we can put a name to a face, although we remember little about them anymore and perhaps never really did.

Good sales people and politicians will hack this circle by getting intel before meetings to make the person feel closer than they really are and there are some great products like LinkedIn that can help. However, this is a temporary solution as you would have to remove someone to genuinely connect.

Are family and friends the same?

Pretty much, although there is a lower cost to maintain kin as we’re genetically hardwired to be more altruistic to kin in proportion to the amount of genes we share. Therefore most friends would appear in the first 50 due to needing more maintenance. This 1950s quote from the great J.B.S.Haldane sums it up pretty nicely:

I would gladly give up my life for two brothers or eight cousins.

Having lived in the UK, China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Indonesia I can see clearly that Asian cultures have way more kin than European. This also means however, that they will have less friends as you hit the same time and brain processing constraints mentioned above. There is no human culture that has a name for a relative outside of a 150 size family tree and global averages seem to give around 50% of slots to family.

One other quirk is that a romantic partner or spouse takes up 2 spaces in the inner 5 therefore removing 2 friends as they are rarely are already in there. I’m sure we all know someone we quickly lost close contact with the moment they met someone special. Now we can forgive perhaps :)

What innovations do we use to manage the job of social?

Friendships are loosely a function of quality time spent and frequency of interaction. How we spend that time varies by gender with females generally needing much more frequent contact with inner circles — even if via phone or text — vs males who need infrequent contact but high quality offline activities.

We only use primate style touch for very special relationships. However, as mentioned earlier, humans invented clever solutions to scale the job of social:

• Laughter was one of the first most ancient methods. For example, tell a joke and three people will laugh including the teller — who amusingly actually laughs on average 50% more. That’s a three times increase in scale vs touch. In a study by Robert Provine, people watching a stand-up comedy with a friend vs alone, laughed a whopping 30 times more. Again some gender difference here with women laughing 126% more than men and 62% more likely to seek gsoh in dating profiles vs men who were more likely to offer it. Like yawning, laughter is also contagious so seems to be a very ancient thing that is hardwired into all of us.
• Synchronous Music and Dance such as drumming to the same beat, singing or dancing to the same song gives twice the increase vs doing it alone.
• Language gives us a four times the increase as you can hold a conversation with four people before it naturally splits into two groups (watch.. happens every time). Storytelling and gossip are particularly strong forms of endorphin releasing conversation — both for the teller and listener. In fact Dunbar believes the campfire story was where we first began to evoke the spiritual forces that bound us together into larger tribal communities.
• Religion is believed by Dunbar to be linked directly to evolution of our bigger brains and was the ultimate tying together of all the above to allow us to live harmoniously in our mega cities side by side.
• Printing presses were a huge product innovation over 500 years ago, as they enabled the reorganisation of the entire World into the nation states we see today. They facilitated the democratisation of important social information like corrupt politicians and dodgy CEOs and created a new kind of stability — not without a few World Wars in between sadly.
• The Internet age saw the invention of feed-based social networks like Twitter/Facebook and private chat such as WhatsApp/WeChat. This allowed information to be spread globally to more people than ever before, and we are now experiencing another wave if tectonic disruptions and shifting of power lines like we saw with the printing press.

It is also important to mention that bandwidth matters for higher quality social engagement. Emojis give higher endorphin hits and more laughter than plain old SMS, high definition photos and video literally transfers megabytes of social information leading to users feeling almost as close as with offline chat; Snapchat have even tried to better it using AI filters inducing more and more laughter although I haven’t seen the data for that yet.

What superpower do humans possess to allow social processing?

It is important to mention a rather simple brain mechanic that makes all of this social complexity possible for us to comprehend.

Homo Sapiens are unique in that they are the only species to have developed 5th order intentionality (see Theory of Mind). This allows powerful shared belief systems to be created like religions and the brands we know and love today. I’ll use religion to explain these 5 orders as it is believed to be the ultimate evolutionary solution to get us to the 21st century, but you can replace God/act with compassion with Apple/express my creativity to get powerful brands too:

1. I believe I’m Adam (I look in mirror and know it’s me looking back)
2. I believe God wants me to act with compassion (Belief in two minds)
3. I believe God wants us to act with compassion (personal religion)
4. I believe you believe God wants us to act with compassion (social religion, but although you believe, I may not believe so can still be deceitful and disrupt the group)
5. I believe you believe we believe God wants us to act with compassion (communal religion where it follows we both believe)

Only Homo Sapiens developed that last level. Our 500k year old cousins the Neanderthal got to 4 and they didn’t make it. Our closest living relative the Chimpanzee only has two levels. It is that fifth level that gives us the stick i.e. if we both know each other believes in the power of the almighty, then we will both turn up for rituals, not steal from each other and ultimately create stable communities.

So what is the Ultimate Social Job?

Tom Hank’s character in the movie was in fact hiring the volleyball product to be his friend so as to maintain a much needed social connection in order to survive and keep his sanity intact.

My hypothesis is that this — along with the above human innovations — were simply solutions to the same social job, that of keeping our social groups stable as we grew our species via self organised family and friendship groups.

Ultimate Social Job: Keep my social groups stable

Now if, like me, you carry this social job in your back pocket when you solve your core functional jobs e.g. ‘send money from a to b’, you will discover more and more that humans rarely do things in isolation. You will then begin to make your product much more powerful and in some cases even go viral : this is something I’ve fortunately managed to do three times in my career so far and it really is the most satisfying of experiences.

How to use in your products

I’ve been accumulating these insights for the last eight years and as I’ve used them to create a few hit social products, I thought it would be helpful to share a few highlights:

Indokasih.com — Charity Crowdfunding Startup

In 2013, marathons became popular in Indonesia and people were posting selfies with finisher medals on social media. If selfies are about projecting status to our networks, I questioned whether we could use this energy to get them to run for charity, raising money from friends for shared causes? Turns out we could; we converted their energy into cash that local & international charities then converted into schools for disadvantaged kids, national disaster aid and environmental protection efforts.

One interesting social experiment raised an issue in that when someone pledged to a friend, only 20% actually followed up with payment even though we emailed them every three days for 21 days. We had the idea to cc the friend who was running and it immediately increased to 80%. This was a clear example of how a social job needed stability and be perceived as following up on obligations to friends, otherwise you could lose those friendships. It also taught me that most of the time we all wear ‘masks’ on the Internet, so building products that make us visible encourage our best behaviours.

PayMe from HSBC

This was the biggest success so far directly applying the job of ensuring social group stability to the functional job of paying and requesting money from friends. It even surprised me when we saw 75%+ of all Hong Kong millennials habitually use this within the first two years of launch owning over 70% of the p2p payments market. This is whilst competing with the formidable tech giants Ant Financial’s AliPay and Tencent’s WeChat.

There are many social jobs at play when it comes to money as it really has the power to create huge group instability — religions even made the effort to codify expected behaviour.

One interesting point to share was related to emojis. When someone asked for money back, 90% of the time they would use only emojis in the message field instead of text. Why? Because emojis are less difficult to be misconstrued as you’re operating at a deeper level than language. To test this I once successfully conversed with a non-English speaking Japanese man via LINE messenger for ten minutes using only emojis. A simple Sushi emoji said so much more than “Give me the money you owe me”. It says “remember that awesome Sushi we ate together last night?” evoking memories of the quality time we spent together eating good food and not of the unsettled debt (eating socially is also another huge solution to social stability).

As discussed above, laughter, music, storytelling all play huge parts in endorphin release between friends; our products should try to evoke these into memory as much as we can. Make people feel good and they will come back for more.

Gojek (Mapan)

My team and I are currently applying these insights at South East Asian super app Gojek. They own a subsidiary called Mapan that focuses on fighting poverty. There are hundreds of millions of people in Asia who still don’t have access to a bank account, smartphone or the Internet. Even low-income families with access often pay more for products and services than those in the city, often for an inferior service. An injury, such as a broken leg, can bankrupt a family who have no insurance cover.

To counter this we are building the largest social network of tech savvy female entrepreneurs on the planet to help reach the bottom of the pyramid with services on par with those in the cities. Each of our part time entrepreneurs/influencers reaches on average eight rural/inner city families, providing us with the scale and reach to ensure we can utilise technology to build a sustainable business.

Here, the social learnings around how rural communities organise themselves and how much trust is placed between people vs formal institutions is just fascinating. Sadly though inequality is so very visible and we are extending our team of smart technical people to enable us to try to build an alternative model based on equal access for all.

I can’t share too much more on this one, however if anyone wants to come and help us and is up for a big career move to Jakarta then please ping me on LinkedIn right away.

Summary

It was a struggle to pack eight years of research and experience into a single blog post, however in sharing this I really hope I can help my fellow product researchers, designers, managers, engineers and marketers to create products that are more human and less transactional — especially in the financial services industry, which, in my opinion, is just plain broken.

Feel free to comment and please reach out if you have more questions.