Reactivate dormant ties
Reach out to people you’ve lost touch with — they carry bridging value and low social cost.
Key takeaways
- What it is: 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.
- Evidence: Backed by observational / correlational evidence.
- Avoid: Opening with an ask before re-establishing genuine connection, which signals that you only reached out for a favour.
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
- 1Scan your contact list or LinkedIn connections for people you haven’t spoken to in one to three years.
- 2Choose someone whose current work or life is genuinely interesting to you.
- 3Send a short, specific message referencing something real: a shared memory, a recent thing they published, a question about their current work.
- 4Focus on giving first — share something useful before asking for anything.
What the evidence says
ObservationalResearch 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.
Honest caveat: Self-reported "usefulness" is subjective; the effect size and generalizability to non-professional contexts is unclear.
- — 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.
IX Coach prompts you to reactivate a specific dormant tie each week and helps you draft a message that leads with genuine interest.
Practice this with IX Coach →