Reactivate dormant ties

Reach out to people you’ve lost touch with — they carry bridging value and low social cost.

Why it works

A dormant tie retains the trust and shared context built during the original relationship, but the person has since moved into a different social world. Reactivating them gives you a bridge with unusually low friction: you don’t need to build trust from scratch as you would with a stranger, yet you gain access to their new network.

How to do it

1. Scan your contact list or LinkedIn connections for people you haven’t spoken to in one to three years.
2. Choose someone whose current work or life is genuinely interesting to you.
3. Send a short, specific message referencing something real: a shared memory, a recent thing they published, a question about their current work.
4. Focus on giving first — share something useful before asking for anything.

Evidence

Research on dormant ties found that reconnecting with lapsed contacts produced more novel, useful information than conversations with either close ties or strangers — a direct test of the bridging mechanism. (observational)

Self-reported "usefulness" is subjective; the effect size and generalizability to non-professional contexts is unclear.

Sources

• Levin, Walter & Murnighan (2011), "Dormant Ties: The Value of Reconnecting," Organization Science

Common mistake

Opening with an ask before re-establishing genuine connection, which signals that you only reached out for a favour.