I’ve been reading a lot about “2.0 communities” from the perspective of employee communities (related to virtual teams and communities of practice) as well as customer communities (related to interactive marketing practices). At times I find the word “community” is misapplied. I’m not the first to notice this. Rachel Happe, an expert on the subject, blogged about this a while ago. In a somewhat lengthy post — but one well worth reading — Kristi Colvin discusses a similar insight challenging our assumptions that customers hunger for more engagement. These posts jogged thoughts I wanted to share with you about communities and audiences.
I’m inspired when I observe community dynamics:
- Weight loss groups. There’s something magical when you get together every week for a meeting as part of a program such as Weight Watchers. A skilled leader in the period of 26 weekly meetings can orchestrate a connection between people who don’t know each other, but who all commit to life-changes together.
- Neighborhood crime watch program. Many communities, especially places with families, stay-at-home moms, kids who play ball on the street, etc. have an arrangement where people keep an eye out for suspicious activities.
- Co-members of a religious group. Many people who affiliate with a religious movement and participate in regular (e.g. weekly) gatherings develop communal relationships with people across a diverse spectrum of society (such as race, education, profession, and age).
- Offering bug fixes in an open-source project. Developers donating time and effort to fix code without getting paid for it is one of the perplexing realities of the Internet economy. But many opensource projects thrive on this behavior of communal bug fixing and online forum support.
These groups have common elements that frame the notion of community (as opposed to audience). Rachel’s blog highlighted many of them. I add that a community needs to have an identity. Membership is rarely ambiguous when it comes to a community member. In some cases you display your affiliation with a lapel pin or some other indicator that you are a member.
However many times these communities fail to establish the cohesion that makes them communal. There are “support groups” that never get the members connected with each other. Most neighbors just mind their own business. Many religious groups disappoint. Tons of open source project lay inactive. So starting a community does not mean automatic success.
But if communities are so much a part of humanity, why do many fail? There are more communities available to us than we are able to join. We filter those we don’t have affinity to. We are stretched too thin and cannot be at every party — and give each one our gifts. We run out of time, energy, and willingness to participate. So we choose our attachments. If only we understood how.
Communities require emotional attachments that makes them communities — they (usually via their leaders) must develop a sense of Shared Fate. Shared fate means that if something happens to the community, then each member feels affected by it. We develop this concept further into at least two sub-behaviors:
- Communal shared fate. That community members care that the community exists for their behalf and that they are willing to do something to help if needed to sustain the community. For example, take over the leadership for a day if the leader needed it. Or pitch in to help run a program.
- Concern for the community members. If a community member needs something that others could help with, they would do so — by virtue of the fact that the other is a community member (even one they don’t know well).
Shared Fate is an important developmental stage in building a community — but there’s more. There’s Shared Faith. Shared faith is when community members develop a common aspiration and support each other in attaining this aspiration.
The most successful opensource projects and Internet standards were created by teams (in many cases from competitive organizations) who joined together to create and support something they all believed in. The Linux operating system, for example, thrives because the people who support it believe that there ought to exist an opensource operating system that worked like Unix. The same is true for the Apache Web server and many of the Java standards. Not only do the community members recognize their shared fate in the projects, they share in faith that having these makes the world a better place.
What about size? Communities of 30 people operate differently from those with 300 people, which differ from those of 1000. The dynamics of onboarding new members, answering common questions, and cross-clique participation differ. So I find that numbers are an important factor to consider when managing and leading communities. But I do not believe that you can draw a meaningful measure of a community by measuring size.
Why?
Because if all you see is size, then I suspect that you might be looking at an audience. We measure audiences by size — and that’s perfectly OK. But if you are talking about community — shared fate and faith — then you have to measure the willingness and execution of inter-community help. Do members help each other? If so — you are community building.
It takes steps. Members have to identify as members and they have to be noticed. They have to feel that the community is “for them”. They have to see common consequence and purpose. And then they will offer their common courtesy — to help others.
What this means: If you are building a community (internally with employees, externally with customers, etc.), orchestrate getting members to help other members. Don’t answer every question. But reward those who do. Measure the strength of your community in the most tangible, visible way — how much service is performed by and for others.
Afterthought: my favorite quote from The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (by memory)
Why should I listen to you? You work in a gas station.
This isn’t a gas station, Dan, it’s a service station. The highest purpose in life is service to others.
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RT @richjyoung: 'Fate and Faith' feels a useful shorthand for a work envt. Yehuda's http://tinyurl.com/35cxxt8 #e20
@markwfoden Thanks. 'Fate and Faith' feels a useful shorthand for a work envt. Yehuda's http://tinyurl.com/35cxxt8 expands further.
Notable article on clarifying what makes a "community" by Gil Yehuda. Like "collaboration" it's often misapplied. http://bit.ly/ckzPHa
Note: I’ll post a follow up which will include a reference to this interesting article on the topic. http://www.wright-house.com/psychology/sense-of-community.html
Interesting post (via @johnt) emotional ties that bind communities http://twurl.nl/zyu4sl Shared vision/faith/fate? Not the same.
Measuring Community Strength http://bit.ly/9u3MTK
RT @gyehuda Measuring Community Strength http://goo.gl/fb/SRwX #e20 (via @bhc3)
Measuring Community Strength http://bit.ly/avKgeM by @gyehuda via @EricPosner
RT @favelafabric: Can you measure community strength? Shared fate, shared emotions? Nice insights at http://bit.ly/9K0yP8
Can you measure community strength? Shared fate, shared emotions? Nice insights at http://bit.ly/9K0yP8
Measuring Community Strength | Gil Yehuda's Enterprise 2.0 Blog http://bit.ly/c3LGOb #SM_Tech
Measuring Community Strength http://bit.ly/avKgeM via @AddToAny
Measuring Community Strength http://bit.ly/avKgeM via @gyehuda
Very thoughtful article, Gil.
I do see the term community thrown out a lot by businesses. Businesses are good at throwing out words aren’t they? lol
To comment on the content, however, I think the idea of shared fate may be a type of community, but not a sole requirement. I believe the reason why communities do not fully form in businesses, can be summed up as “my job is not my family.” People get fired from their jobs, laid off in thousands, and they know this. Each successive generation is much less loyal to society, businesses, and government.
If business leaders walked the talk more, went through tough times without the easy ‘restructuring efforts’ (which often fail), and truly desired community from their employees, it would be different. This is just one variable, loyalty. However, many others exist that I can think of. Fate is related in a way.
Jeff,
I hear you. Strong leadership can create a sense of unity and loyalty in the workplace — but this evaporates once the layoffs occur. I’m actually talking about a different level of community within the workplace. Let me explain:
As a worker I have a direct relationship to my boss, co-workers, direct-reports, direct customers, and team admins. These are people I work with every day, and I may of may not like them — but I develop a relationship of dependence with them. Something that happens to one of us will affect us all. But this is not a community — it’s a team. We share goals and purpose.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are the people in the elevator or down the hall who have the same type of desk I have, the same badge, and their paycheck is signed with the same name as mine is. I probably don’t know their name, but I know that we both work for the same CEO (or better: we all work for the shareholders). My relationship to them is still not communal.
But there is a place in between where employees connect with others who have commonality, but are on different teams — and they can form a community. My example (from my years doing this): all the .NET developers in my company. We all had interest in learning about new versions, bug fixes, negotiated priced for development tools, as well as the cost for internal hosting and support — but we all worked in different places, products, divisions etc. If one developer found a serious issue with something — they’d tell the vendor — but they also should tell the 999 other .NET developers who may need to know about the issue (or who may have a solution). Getting these 1000 developers to form a community is powerful. (I know this, cuz this is what I did for a living before becoming an analyst). The dynamics were different than that of a product team, and different than just being co-employed by the same company. We were a “community” in the sense we shared fate (your fix might help my product), and shared faith (we eventually created an internal open-source marketplace to help jump start new projects).
The community was focused, we had identity, etc. Most employees were not in this community, only the .NET developers were (and we created a parallel community for Java developers, then other communities for non-developer roles too…)
When the layoffs occurred, no one felt disloyal to the community — they did of course feel disloyal to the leadership. The community did not let them down, leadership did. They still had faith in the community though.
Very good input Gil. From France, I lead a professionale community since 4 years with 400 members global. Your post is just in what I observe in the ervery day lmife of this community. You input is valuable for every one leading or building a community.
Keep going.
Thank you kindly for you comment. Words like these encourage me to take the time and blog. I’m glad you find this valuable.
Gil – this is a great post and yes, people throw around the world community a lot and don’t really understand it in the same why that I would define it. People use audience/network/community/group interchangeably. To me, they infer different densities of relationships (I wrote a post on this here: http://community-roundtable.com/2009/09/a-community-a-network-an-audience/) Within either marketing/support or internal communities this relationship density matters. If awareness it the goal, you want a network of loose ties. If collaboration is the goal, you want tight knit groups. Communities are conduits and feeder organizations for both.
I really like your additional insight that communities need to feel they have a common fate – and then have the passion/faith to work toward that fate constructively. It’s why neighborhood community development (in the old school sense) is so important to having a positive community experience. Shared fate drives people to clean up parks, alert police, etc.
Your final point, which almost gets lost here, is really important. If you do everything for community members, they will not do things for themselves and become co-dependent. It is a little like learned helplessness. Jim & I often discuss the fact that good community management can look like nothing on the surface because often community managers work behind the scenes to encourage & enable people to step up and do for themselves. Community managers are there to support members and then to make sure the productive nature of the work the community is doing doesn’t veer off course too much.
When companies think about building out social infrastructures, it’s helpful to have the network/community/group framework in mind. A 100,000 person company is a network of people, tied together by a common thing – that they work for the company but most of those people may have very little in common. So then were to the communities need to be? Maybe they align functionally, maybe geographically, maybe by customer segment – depends on what focus the company wants to emphasize. Groups are created or emerge as projects/initiatives/etc take shape. How an organization connects all of those things can support or inhibit information flow and those flows create patterns that can be analyzed and measured against performance or outcomes.
Thanks for the great thoughts here.
Rachel,
Thanks for your comments and insight here. You are totally on target. I’ll share with you that I once worked in a company where senior management actually fostered internal competition. So even in cases where you think people would work together — they might not. Crazy.