How to Bring a Community to Life
Part III of my series on Emergent Community Design
Welcome to Part III of my series on emergent community design:
Part I: How Communities Emerge
Part II: What is Emergent Community Design?
Part III: How to Bring a Community to Life (This post)
Part IV: How to Design a Community Container (coming soon!)
Part V: The Seven Principles of Emergent Community Design (coming soon!)
Note: This thesis continues to unfold! It has now expanded into a five-part series. Where will it end?! Who knows. But I’m having a lot of fun exploring this topic with you all. As always, please comment with your reflections, questions, hole pokes, and anything else that comes to mind.
In Part I, we explored the basic concepts of emergence in nature and how it applies to communities. In Part II we started to apply emergence to the work of creating and facilitating communities. Now let’s get a bit more practical.
Part III will cover:
✔️ The process for navigating complex systems
✔️ A new community is hatched 🥚
✔️ How to form a community hypothesis
✔️ How to tap into your community intuition
✔️ How to conduct community research
✔️ How you’ll know when a community is emerging
Let’s get into it…
The process for navigating complex systems
We’ve talked a lot about complex systems in this series. I’d like to kick off Part III by introducing you to someone who has spent years studying how to navigate complex systems, Dave Snowden.
Snowden is a Welsh management consultant and researcher in the field of knowledge management and the application of complexity science.
To help us understand how to make decisions in complex situations, Snowden created The Cynefin Framework. According to his framework, we navigate complex systems by repeating a three-step process:
Probe: try something
Sense: observe, measure, and feel into what emerges
Respond: amplify what works, if nothing works then try another probe
This is the process we can follow when practicing emergent community design.
Let’s look at a hypothetical example…
A new community is hatched 🥚
Say you were inspired by the chicken theme of Part II and decided you’re going to start hosting dedicated gatherings for chicken lovers. No, not that kind you sicko... like people who want to learn about them and maybe raise some of their own.
You can sense that people are yearning for this conversation. Everywhere you go, the topic of chickens keeps coming up. It’s like the universe won’t shut up about chickens and you know what? You love it. You could talk about chickens all day. Chickens give you a full-body YES. You decide it’s time to run a community experiment.
Your idea is to design a gathering that will take place at a local farm in the region. The experience will give people a chance to learn how chickens can be ethically raised and meet other chicken fans, live and in-person. Beautiful vision!
What you would do is:
Probe: Design the initial container for your gathering and invite 20 people
Sense: Get feedback on whether people are interested, if they sign up, and what they want from the gathering
Respond: Decide if you’ll go through with the gathering or not based on the quality of the response
Let’s say you get a good enough response to go through with the gathering. Great! Go through the three steps again with a new probe:
Probe: Host the event
Sense: Did people love it? Were they excited to be there? Were they engaged? Did they give positive feedback? Did they express interest in attending another gathering? Did you love it as much as you thought you would? Do you want to do it again?
Respond: Decide if you’ll host another gathering and if so, what worked well that you’ll do again, what you’ll change, and what you’ll cut.
Do that over and over again, and you’re likely to tune into a community that wants to emerge.
Note how different this feels from how many people and businesses build community today. They come up with a 12-month plan, launch a big, complex forum or event series, and when it doesn’t emerge in the way they envisioned they shrug and say, “Guess this community thing doesn’t work!”
Hey, sometimes you get lucky and your big, complex experiment works. But it’s a big risk of time, money, and energy. Most of the great and lasting communities I know of started with small, simple experiments.
The reality is, your community might end up looking nothing like your initial probe. Here’s the story of how Philz, one of San Francisco’s favorite coffee chains, started:
It’s much better, in my experience, to keep your initial probes small and take a bottom-up (emergent) approach. This will help you more effectively tune into the community container that people are yearning for. You’ll know when it’s time to take a big swing.
How to form a community hypothesis
So how do you know what kind of community to experiment with? What should your initial probe be?
I recommend two paths:
Internal exploration: tuning into your intuition to discover the community that you, and others, are yearning for
External exploration: conducting research to tune into and validate what form of connection others yearn for
If you already have a strong sense of the kind of community that wants to emerge, start with internal exploration. If you’re feeling disconnected from what the community needs, then you may want to start with external exploration.
Let’s talk about each path in a little more detail…
How to tune into your community intuition
Intuition plays a critical role in emergent community design. Effective community creators tap into their inner knowing and feeeel into where the river of connective energy wants to flow. They develop a sense for what community wants to emerge.
But that’s not how many people design communities today. We tend to forget about our intuition. We use playbooks, frameworks, and canvases to tell us what to create for our community. We seek data. We make plans.
We take an intellectual approach to designing something that is very emotional, relational, and somatic. We use our minds to search for answers that our hearts and bodies already hold.
Trust your intuition.
Often, successful communities are started by people who are solving for their own needs…
Reading Rhythms was started by a group of friends who loved reading and lacked alternatives to going out drinking. It’s now growing rapidly because it tapped into something a lot of people (introverted book nerds looking for connection) were looking for too.
TechWalk was started by Christine Farrier who was in between jobs and felt like she didn’t belong at existing networking events. So she created a networking format that worked for her: long walks in the city. It turned out it worked for thousands of people like her.
One of the first “professional” communities I started was a weekly Twitter chat called u30pro. Basically, I was a 20-something professional and wanted a space to talk about the unique challenges of getting started in a new career after college. So I started it with my friends Lauren Fernandez and Scott Hale. It grew to hundreds of participants, gathering weekly, over several years.
Asking yourself, “What kind of community am I yearning for?” is a great place to start.
⭐️ To help you tap into your intuition, I created a free “somatic community design” meditation. It’s a bit “woo” but very effective. Try it out here!
How to conduct community research
Tuning into what others are yearning for will require talking to them, and conducting research about their needs.
Interviews, focus groups, surveys, and market research are the four core methods of external exploration.
Personally, I think interviews and focus groups are the best place to start. You gain a more intimate understanding of peoples’ nuanced needs when you talk to them directly, and it gives you the opportunity to start forming relationships.
After doing some interviews and focus groups, if you’d like to get insights from a larger group, you can create a survey based on what came up in the interviews, if that feels helpful.
Market research may involve looking at other communities out there to help you refine what it is about them that isn’t fulfilling the need you aim to fill. My friend Greg Isenberg is a big fan of scouring reddit for community opportunities, as an example.
When you’re researching other communities, look at their “turpentine” and explore how your community can fill a hole in the conversation. Find what’s unique about your community (aka your “community wedge”).
Market research may also involve looking at existing studies and gathering data related to your community that will help educate where there’s a strong need.
⭐️ Questions to help you tune into the community that wants to emerge (you can answer these questions yourself, and ask them of your members):
What questions do you want to ask, but can’t?
What makes you feel unable or unsafe to ask these questions in your current communities?
What permission are you waiting for that this community could provide?
Where do you experience suffering? Are you experiencing that suffering alone?
What conversations don’t you want to have? What feels annoying, exhausted, or overdone?
How do you want to be seen by the world, but the world doesn’t see you that way?
What activities or experiences feel fun or important to you, but you don’t currently do?
What questions or challenges do you have that can only be solved in community?
What form of community is missing?
What form of community feels joyful?
When you think about this community idea, do you feel a sensation of expansion or contraction?
How you’ll know a community is emerging
Through internal and external exploration, you’ll form your hypothesis. This is your initial community design, or “probe”.
You’ll decide on the structure of your container: the purpose, people, space, experience, rules, guidelines, intentions, etc. (we’ll talk more about how to design community containers in Part IV).
If you’ve successfully tuned into the connection people are yearning for, created a compelling container, and offered them a loving invitation, they will flow into your community and bring their energy.
As members arrive, you’ll immediately start getting feedback on whether or not you’ve found the magic. This is the “sense” part of the Cynefin Framework. You’re feeling into whether or not you’ve found “community-member-fit”.
We tend to default to data here, looking at engagement metrics to inform if we’ve found community-member-fit or not.
But in my experience, you don’t need data. You’ll know if it’s working.
Think about a recent event you attended and how you could feel the energy in the room. You can sense if people are happy or sad, excited or bored, eager to connect or eager to leave. We can feel when a community is clicking. We can feel when it’s not.
If it’s working, members will also probably tell you. They’ll express their gratitude for the container. They’ll share how it’s exactly what they’ve been yearning for. When people find their community, it’s hard for them not to talk about it.
And complimenting your intuition with feedback forms, surveys, and interviews, is a great idea. Even if your community is clicking, this feedback will help you refine your next probe.
You shouldn’t need to force engagement. When you have community-member-fit, engagement flows freely. If you feel like you’re forcing it, it’s a sign that you haven’t tapped into the flow yet. You’ll need to keep running experiments.
Lets review…
That’s all for Part III! Here’s what we covered:
✔️ The process for navigating complex systems
✔️ A new community is hatched 🥚
✔️ How to form a community hypothesis
✔️ How to tap into your community intuition
✔️ How to conduct community research
✔️ How you’ll know when a community is emerging
In Part IV, we’re going to get even more practical and look at how to design your community containers and probes with emergence in mind. I can’t promise that there won’t be more chicken puns but I will do my best.
So thought-provoking and, honestly, validating to hear this stance on somatic and intuitive knowing - I’ve found this to be my own community-building, decision-making superpower, but didn’t have the words for it until recently. 🙏