In 2011, Daniel Levin, Jorge Walter, and J. Keith Murnighan published a study in Organization Science that upended conventional wisdom about professional networking.

They asked executives to do two things: reach out to a weak-tie contact they'd been in regular contact with, and reach out to a dormant tie — someone they knew well but hadn't spoken to in at least three years.

Then they measured the quality of the advice those executives received.

Dormant ties won. Handily.

The executives who reconnected with people they hadn't spoken to in years reported getting better, more useful, more novel information than those who reached out to contacts they were already in regular contact with. The dormant ties delivered more valuable insights, more actionable ideas, more genuine surprise.

This is the finding most professionals have backward. We invest in active contacts. We let dormant ones fade. The research says we have the priorities reversed.

Why dormant ties outperform

The mechanism becomes clear once you examine it.

When you reconnect with a dormant tie — someone you knew well but haven't spoken to in three or more years — two things have happened in the intervening time. First, you've each accumulated different experiences, exposure, and information. Second, you share enough common history that the conversation can be efficient and honest. You don't need to establish trust from scratch. It already exists.

This is the compound value that Levin et al. identified. Dormant ties combine two assets that don't often coexist: informational diversity (they've been somewhere you haven't) and relational trust (you've been somewhere together before).

Active weak ties have informational diversity, but less trust — you need to spend more of the conversation establishing credibility. Close friends have trust, but limited informational diversity. Dormant ties sit in an unusual sweet spot.

There's also a subtler dynamic. When you reach out to someone after a significant gap, the implicit message is: something made me think of you specifically. That's a meaningful signal. It's not ambient, it's not automated — it's a genuine reconnection. People respond to it differently than they respond to regular contact.

The decay curve most people don't see

Here's the practical problem: the value of a dormant tie increases with time, but our ability to act on it decreases.

A contact you haven't spoken to in six months is not really a dormant tie — just a slightly neglected one. The relationship is still warm. Reaching out requires little friction.

A contact you haven't spoken to in three years is a dormant tie. The relationship has more information gap to bridge — but also more trust capital accumulated from when the relationship was active. The reach-out is more awkward to initiate, but the conversation, if it happens, tends to be richer.

A contact you haven't spoken to in eight years is approaching the edge. The trust capital from the original relationship still exists, but the friction of reconnecting is high enough that most people don't attempt it. The opportunity erodes.

This is the decay curve most professionals aren't tracking: the window in which a dormant tie is worth reactivating is real, but it closes. Not because the other person has forgotten you — in most cases they haven't — but because the longer the gap, the harder it becomes to initiate.

The executives in Levin's study had to be prompted to reach out. That's the key insight buried in the methodology. Left to their own devices, they wouldn't have done it. The research team created the intervention. Without it, those dormant-tie conversations never happen.

What "reconnecting" actually looks like

Most people who understand the value of dormant ties still don't act on it, because they don't know how to reactivate a relationship without it feeling awkward or transactional.

The answer is: be specific, and don't ask for anything.

The worst dormant-tie outreach sounds like: "Hey, it's been a while! I wanted to reconnect. I'm actually looking for [thing] and thought of you."

The person on the receiving end of that message immediately understands that three years of silence ended the moment you needed something. That's not reconnecting — that's extracting.

Good dormant-tie outreach sounds like: "I saw your company just launched [X] — that's exactly the problem you were working on back at [Y]. Congrats, that's a long time coming."

Or: "I've been thinking about [specific conversation you had] more lately. Turns out you were right."

Or even: "I'm going to be in [city] next month. Any chance you'd want to grab coffee?"

None of these ask for anything. All of them signal that you paid attention, that you remember something specific, that the outreach is genuine rather than instrumental. That's the format that works.

The network you're not maintaining

There's a mental model many professionals carry: their network is the people they currently know. The active contacts, the people they'd call, the connections they made recently.

Levin's research suggests this mental model is wrong in a way that materially costs people career opportunities.

Your real network includes everyone you've ever known well enough to have a real conversation with. Former colleagues, former classmates, former neighbors, former collaborators, people you've worked with at companies you've since left. That population is almost certainly much larger than the list of people you consider "in your network."

Most of those people have drifted into dormancy — not because the relationship ended, but because neither of you had a reason to reach out. The relationship is suspended, not finished.

Granovetter's 1973 work on weak ties showed that your acquaintances carry more career value than your close friends, because they have access to different information. Levin's work adds a temporal dimension: acquaintances you used to know — but don't currently talk to — carry additional value because of what's happened to both of you in the intervening time.

The best network for career outcomes isn't the one you've built recently. It's the one you've accumulated over your whole career and haven't yet let fully expire.

The intervention that makes it work

The executives in Levin's study needed to be prompted. That's not a character failing — it's a structural problem. There's no natural trigger for dormant-tie outreach the way there's a natural trigger for calling a close friend.

You reach out to close friends when something reminds you of them, when you're celebrating, when you're struggling, when you just feel like it. The relationship generates its own gravitational pull.

Dormant ties don't generate that pull. The relationship isn't dead — it's just inert. It needs an external prompt.

What that prompt can be:

  • Something happening in their career (a promotion, a new role, a company milestone — anything that makes a "congrats" natural)
  • Something happening in yours (a move, a launch, a transition — that gives you something genuine to share)
  • Something in the news relevant to their work
  • A specific memory that resurfaces in a relevant context

The challenge is catching these moments. Most of us don't have a system for it. We don't think about former colleagues until we happen to see them, and by the time we see them, the window for natural outreach has often closed.

This is the infrastructure problem dormant ties have always had, and it's the problem worth solving.

Levin, D.Z., Walter, J., & Murnighan, J.K. (2011). Dormant Ties: The Value of Reconnecting. Organization Science, 22(4), 923–939.

Granovetter, M.S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380.