How Communities Emerge

Part one of my five-part series on "emergent community design"

Midjourney prompt: “An energy field emanating from a group of interconnected nodes in the style of Roy Lichtenstein”

Welcome to Part One of my three-part series exploring emergent community design:

Part I: How Communities Emerge (this post)
Part II: What is Emergent Community Design?
Part III: How to Bring a Community to Life
Part IV: How to Design a Community Container (coming soon!)
Part V: The Seven Principles of Emergent Community Design (coming soon!)

Today in Part I, we’ll cover:

✔️ What is emergence?
✔️ The human urge to connect
✔️ How communities emerge
✔️ Why humans aren’t like ants
✔️ The emergent attributes of communities

Background and disclaimers: This is an unfolding thesis. Please comment with your reflections, challenges, and thoughts to help it unfold! I have done 50+ hours of research on this essay over the last 8 months but I’m not a scientist and I’m open to being wrong. For the purpose of this essay, I’m defining community broadly as, “a group of people who find their connection to each other to be meaningful”. Ok, let’s do this!

What is emergence?

When fish come together, they form a school.

A school isn’t simply a collection of fish, though. No no no…

While in a school, fish can do all sorts of fancy things like synchronize their movements, respond collectively to threats, mock the main characters in Disney movies, and so much more.¹

No individual fish plans or designs the unique attributes of the school. They appear organically.

This is known as ✨emergence✨.²

Emergence is the way complex patterns rise out of a collection of relatively simple parts and interactions.

It appears everywhere in nature:

Atoms come together and form cells.

Cells come together and form organisms.

Ants come together and form colonies.

Birds come together and form flocks.

Bees come together and form hives.

In each case, individual “dumb” parts come together and a more complex, “smart” system emerges.³

There’s no central decision-maker orchestrating these movements in nature. Each individual is wired to follow a simple set of rules that leads them to emergence.

For example, in a flock of Starlings, each bird follows three rules:

1. Fly toward the center 

2. Don’t collide 

3. Match speed and direction with your nearest neighbors 

Each bird acts in accordance with the seven birds around them, follows these three rules, and a flock emerges.

Fascinating, right? 

Of course, the next question my brain asked was, “What about human communities? Do we emerge?”

The answer, I believe, is yes. And the implications have forever changed how I think about community design and human connection.

The human urge to connect

Prisoners in solitary confinement, while on death row, would seem like unlikely candidates to start a Dungeons and Dragons club. Well, they did!

Even in the most restrictive environments, humans will find a way to connect.

Why are communities so likely to form wherever there are humans? It’s no different from why emergence occurs elsewhere in nature:

Evolution!

There’s strength in numbers. Fish are more likely to survive in a school, birds in a flock, and humans in a tribe. The traits that made us more likely to gather were passed on. The traits that made us more likely to isolate from other humans weren’t, and the introverts all died (just kidding).⁴

We may not be hunting for our food or fighting off saber tooth tigers today, but our brains and bodies are wired the same way. Feeling isolated or abandoned can feel a lot like you’re going to die because for most of humanity, that was true.

Perhaps that’s why loneliness feels so scary and why we’re inextricably drawn to each other.

How communities emerge

It was 1938 and 22-year-old Kae Einfeldt was working her dream job as a cartoonist for Disney.

Kae stood out, literally. She was 6-foot-3 (and the only woman in the room).

While working on an obscure movie you’ve probably never heard of called "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", she had the spark of an idea for a “tall club”. She recalled, “I painted dwarfs day after day and I started thinking, we’re doing something nice for little people, but what about tall people?”

She decided to pitch the LA Times an article about the struggles of the tall. They were into it and her piece titled, “Six-Foot-Three (What Will It Be?)” was published. Eight people responded saying they’d be interested in getting together and North America's first tall club was born!

She called the first club “The Longfellows Club". Soon a second tall club formed in Kansas City called “The Greater Kansas City Skyliners”. Then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth. On June 24, 1940, Life Magazine published an article called “Life Goes to a Tip Toppers Party” and soon tall clubs were springing up all over the country.

Though Kae has since passed away, thousands of tall people still gather today in dozens of local chapters around the world.

Tall Clubs International emerged over time through “the community lifecycle”, which I cover in The Business of Belonging:

1. Seed: A person, or group of people, feels isolated around some aspect of their life and feels the urge to gather. They plant the seed with a first experience (online or offline) and it catches life. A sense of belonging emerges.

2. Growth: Others who feel the urge to gather are drawn to the community and the community grows. Each active participant influences its direction. Like fresh branches, new norms, rules, language, and other attributes emerge.

3. Maturity: The community reaches a full expression. The new norms and emergent attributes are firmly in place. The branches of the tree are set. There isn’t a whole lot of room for new attributes to emerge.

4. Pollination: People start feeling the urge for a unique expression of the community. They replicate the experience as new chapters, subgroups, or entirely new communities. New seeds are planted, creating space for new attributes to emerge.

Look into the story of any established community and you’ll witness this journey unfold. It often starts with a humble beginning, and complexity emerges over time:

• Burning Man, now an entire city built by 70 thousand attendees each year, started when Larry Harvey and Jerry James invited 20 people to burn an 8-foot tall wooden figure on Baker Beach in celebration of the summer solstice in 1986.

• The Polar Bear Club, now with dozens of clubs (thousands informally) taking the icy plunge each year to raise money, started in 1903 with the OG health influencer, Bernarr Macfadden, jumping into the freezing ocean at Coney Island alone.

• The Dinner Party, with dozens of chapters healing together through potluck dinners around the world, started with a single potluck dinner organized by Lennon Flowers and Carla Fernandez who were looking for a space to process their grief with people their age.

The initial event doesn’t have to be small, humble, or unexpected. Some communities start with a big experience or a lot of intentional structure. But what emerges within that structure, and how that structure evolves over time, is never totally in their control.

We don’t build community.

We build containers where community has a chance to emerge.

^ This was a profound insight for me. It will be a core theme in Part II as we dive into designing communities for emergence.

Why humans aren’t like ants

While there are many similarities in nature (unconscious) and human (conscious) emergence, there are also key differences.

The first big difference is that unlike in nature, in human communities, there’s usually a central decision-maker. Someone chooses the initial rules, features, guidelines, and format of the container.

Despite their title, “queen ants” have no power over the colony and do not tell individual ants what to do. Their roles emerge organically. (photo cred)

So while emergence is always present, it’s rare that it will be purely “bottom up” like we see in nature.

Another difference is our ability to make conscious decisions. 

In nature, things generally follow “cause-and-effect” rules. An ant releases a pheromone signal and the other ants fall in line. Fish don’t consciously decide to join a school. A tree doesn’t choose to grow in a forest. It just happens.

Humans, on the other hand, have choice. We follow “cause-THINK-effect” rules. We don’t just join a community because someone tells us to, we get to decide.⁵

So even when a community feels “bottom-up”, like a mob for example, our consciousness is still orchestrating and influencing what emerges in ways we wouldn’t see in nature.

A third difference is the complexity of our communication. We use words, eye contact, body language, smell, touch, and even neural syncing, to name a few. This wide range of inputs increases the variability of what can emerge.

This, combined with our ego, is why human communities can take many unique forms while ant colonies, bee hives, and schools of fish will generally look and function the same way each time (within the same species).

That all said, if we zoom out, different types of human communities tend to be quite consistent in their form.

For example, all cities have the same structural attributes like business districts, geographical distribution of income, parks, public transit systems, etc. They may have different cultures but the structural attributes are the same, just like in an ant colony or bee hive.

The same is true of membership communities. Every community looks unique but when we zoom out, we see the same structural attributes emerge.

Let’s wrap up by exploring what those attributes are…

The emergent attributes of communities

One of the markings of emergence is how the larger, complex system develops a set of attributes that are unique from each individual part.

So what are the attributes that humans take on when in community, that they don’t exhibit independently?

Here are some that I’ve identified:

1. Collective effervescence: The magical “sense” of community, belonging, and connectedness members get when a community is clicking (coined by Émile Durkheim)

2. Culture and behavioral norms: Members start behaving differently in the community than they do elsewhere. New cultural norms emerge.

3. Collective decision-making: The community will make decisions that are unique from what each individual may have decided. Groupthink seeps in.

4. Social capital and hierarchy: As members interact and transact a system of trust and reciprocity forms. Implicit social hierarchy and explicit positions like moderators, facilitators, chapter leaders, mediators, and mentors may emerge.

5. Community wisdom: Collective knowledge emerges from the diverse experiences and skills of their members. Shared knowledgebases start to form.

6. Collective action: Members may coordinate to achieve goals or address social concerns outside of the community. Each member becomes more powerful and influential by being a member of the whole.

7. Rituals and ceremonies: Formalized experiences develop around membership stages, celebrations, and transformations.

8. Group memory and lore: Members form a shared recollection of past events, experiences, and traditions within a community, communicated through storytelling, rituals, and documentation.

9. Identity, language, and symbols: Members will continuously seek more effective ways of communicating and expressing their identity, forming entirely new languages, styles, uniforms, iconography, and imagery. 

10. Rules, laws, and governance: As bad actors show up and challenge the health and safety of the community, new rules and guidelines organically emerge. Community policy generally becomes more strict and complex over time.

11. Subgroups, cliques, and spinoffs: As members' needs become more specific than what the broader group can provide, new social circles form as cliques (implicit) or chapters and subgroups (explicit). Some spin off into standalone communities.

12. Biological synchronization: When humans interact and feel connected, our brainwaves and hormones can start to synchronize. Physiologically, we become a unique entity when in community. (🤯)

I don’t think this list is exhaustive. I invite you to share other attributes that may emerge within a community in the comments.

Lets review…

That’s all for Part I! This essay focused on the basic concepts of emergence and how it applies to communities. Here’s what we covered:

✔️ What is emergence?
✔️ The human urge to connect
✔️ How communities emerge
✔️ Why humans aren’t like ants
✔️ The emergent attributes of communities

In Part II we’ll get practical. I’ll cover what emergent community design is, teach you a process for how to navigate complex systems, and help you apply all of this to your community building practice.

I can’t wait to see what emerges!

Your Turn:

Again, this is an unfolding thesis and I invite you to help it unfold. Comment or hit reply to share on any (or all) of these prompts:

1. What stood out for you from this post? Did anything shift?

2. What didn’t add up? What holes can you poke? (I love friendly debates!)

3. What questions do you have about emergence and how it applies to community building? (I’ll make sure to cover your questions in parts II and III.)

4. What’s your favorite story of community emergence?

5. Can you think of any examples of community where emergence wasn’t present? IS MY ENTIRE THESIS FLAWED?!

6. Would you rather be a bird, a fish, or a bee? Why?

7. What do you notice about your own yearning for connection and community?

Acknowledgments and further reading

Adrienne Maree Brown’s book “Emergent Strategy” has been hugely educational and inspiring. She artfully connects emergence to social justice work.

Steven Johnson’s book “Emergence” is a deep exploration into the history of emergence research and how emergence works in all of its various forms. I learned a ton from this book.

The Women’s Permaculture Guild has a thorough guide to emergent design which is tangential to community design and worth a read.

I’m deeply grateful to Ben Bradbury, Hillary Leone, Ruthie Berber, David Nebinski, Rachel Saslaw, Saumya Gupta, and Saba Ahmed, for helping me shape this piece with their thoughtful feedback and wisdom.

1. If you’re fascinated by how schools of fish work, go deeper with this research paper: “Individual Behavior and Emergent Properties of Fish Schools”.

2. For a tad deeper intro on emergence, this 7-minute video is very worth a watch.

3. Emergence research often refers to simple parts as “dumb”. Pretty rude tbh.

4. Fun fact: Introverts love human connection too, they just need less of it to reach “social homeostasis”.

5. Of course, the decision itself is, to an extent, emergent. Do you ever make a decision or are all of your decisions the emergent result of everything you’ve experienced in your life and everything that’s happened in the universe leading up to this moment where you now have a certain set of values and priorities around which you make the decision? 🙃