The Digital You - Digital Mirror: Pecking Order

When people address email messages to multiple recipients, the order in which they list those recipients is often revealing. Recipients who are in some way viewed as more important tend to be listed first. Digital Mirror's analysis of this reveals a natural Pecking Order – who is most important to you and who is less so.

The pecking chickens on the top perch represent more important people in your personal pecking order, according to Digital Mirror's analysis. Lower perches are for increasingly less important individuals.

The analysis works on the principle that the people who appear earlier in the correspondent list (on the To, Cc, or Bcc line of each email) are higher in the pecking order than those who appear after them. By analyzing the To, Cc, and Bcc lines of the emails you sent, Digital Mirror ranks your correspondents by importance.

More detail

Digital Mirror examines To, Cc and Bcc headers in your email, looking for patterns in the order in which recipients are listed. (Since these are obviously unchanged when someone replies to an email, Digital Mirror examines only the first email in any thread, when the headers were originally composed.)

Scores are calculated pairwise for all recipients. So, for example, if the recipients of a set of emails are Bart, Lisa and Maggie, Digital Mirror calculates how many times Bart was listed before each of Lisa and Maggie; how many times Lisa was listed before each of Bart and Maggie; and how many times Maggie was listed before each of Bart and Lisa. The person who is most often listed ahead of the others is highest in the pecking order.

This visualization typically shows only a glimpse of all of the information Digital Mirror uncovers. People often have more than one pecking order. For example, if you have three separate groups of people that you email – people in your department at work, your book-reading circle, and the indie band that you lead, for example – and you rarely or never send the same message to all of these groups, this may lead to the creation of at least three separate pecking orders, one for each group. This free version of Digital Mirror shows up to two of the pecking orders it finds.

Pecking orders can also be extensive, many layers deep. For this visualization, Digital Mirror selects just four levels (or "perches"). Similarly, each perch can accommodate only a limited number of chickens, so some may be left out for lack of space.

Quantity of communication also plays a role in the selection of what is shown. No matter how important someone is, if you email her only rarely, it's quite likely she does not show up here. Digital Mirror selects individuals, in part, on the basis of how frequently they appear at the front of a list of recipients.

Specifically, at least one of the chickens on the top perch is selected because the individual appears more times than any other ahead of other names in your email headers. The other chickens are selected because of their relationship to that "top chicken."

Common Questions

Is Pecking Order the same as an org chart?

No. The Pecking Order reflects the way you prioritize the people you communicate with. This often is different from the formal organizational chart – and the way it differs is often a source of the most valuable insight about who is really important to you.

Why do I see the same person in more than one Pecking Order?

People often have more than one Pecking Order. For example, if you have three separate groups of people that you email – people in your department at work, your book-reading circle, and the indie band that you lead, for example – and you rarely or never send the same message to all of these groups, this may lead to the creation of at least three separate Pecking Orders, one for each group. This free version of Digital Mirror shows up to two of the Pecking Orders it finds. If someone is a member of both of these groups (a member of the indie band is also in the book-reading circle, for example), then that person could appear in both Pecking Orders.

Why doesn't this view have a timeline control?

This version of Digital Mirror looks at your emails over the entire time period to identify the best possible Pecking Orders. (The more supporting data it can analyze, the better the visualization results, in general.) Some future versions of Digital Mirror may incorporate a Pecking Order timeline control that will allow users to see changes in their Pecking Orders over time.

There is someone I would really expect to see here. Why are they missing?

The Pecking Order visualization is based on the order in which you list people in the headers of email messages you send. Some possible reasons an individual may not appear in the visualization are:

You do not send many emails to the person in question.
You send emails to that person, but few of those emails are also addressed to other people, so Digital Mirror is unable to determine a pattern in the way you list the names of addressees.
This version of Digital Mirror shows up to two pecking orders. If you are seeing two pecking orders, it is possible that the pecking order for the person you are interested in was not selected.

What does it mean when two or three people are on the same level?

This visualization tells you about relationships between people on different levels, rather than the relationship between people on the same level. Digital Mirror starts by placing, on the top level, one person who is at the top of the selected pecking order. Digital Mirror then puts one or more people who are below that person in the pecking order on the second level, and so on. So the level on which any person appears is determined by his or her relationship with someone on the level above; when two or three people appear on the same level, it indicates that each is lower in the pecking order than at least one person on the level above.

These results don't look quite right to me – are they?

If you are running Digital Mirror on personal data, please note that this version is optimized for analysis of data in a work or other organizational context. For personal data, it is possible that you may find some of the results less interesting or relevant.

Even if that is not the case, people are sometimes puzzled by the results Digital Mirror presents. But these results are firmly based on the data: if you see something unexpected, it is likely to be because your data suggests something different than your perception. We strongly recommend that you look into the data yourself. In many cases, you can do this by clicking on the specific result in the visualization to bring up an evidence panel that shows some examples that led to the conclusion. In our experience, in the vast majority of cases, the data will support the Digital Mirror result. The challenge is to see yourself as Digital Mirror and others see you. If you have tried and still believe the result is wrong, please let us know.

Why am I seeing only a sample for this visualization, instead of real results?

Digital Mirror is designed to create a reasonably wide range of visualizations, not all of which will be applicable to everyone. It is quite likely that, for any individual user, there will not be enough relevant data for every single visualization. This is normal, which is why we provide a sample for you to enjoy!