More on the simple rules of community forming…
Here is Shawn’s current thinking on community formation:
Simple rule 1: Participating in a community must be easy. Hold meetings on a regular basis�say the first Tuesday of the month. Make the technology dead simple. Avoid technology until you need it.
Simple rule 2: Someone �who matters� must care about what you are doing. In the early stages it might be quite unclear how your community�s activities delivers business value. Consequently, the �people that matter� must initially believe in the concept of a community of practice. More importantly, the core team and then the other members must care about the topic�nothing new there. Knowing what a group cares about can sometimes be difficult to work out. It requires discussions among members to discover the activities people would commit their precious discretionary time to. If you don�t find this, you don�t have a community in which case people will always be too busy. The choice here is to disband or persist in looking for a better topic. This is the point where your community activities should operate like a skunkworks. Low cost and exploratory.
Simple rule 3: Community activities must link to member needs. Remember I said the end result must link to a need. Some people need to be connected, others need public recognition, while some want greater access to power. Your discussions at the outset need to get a sense of the many needs your community should cater for. Running anecdote circles would be a good way to get people to express these needs.
These are good, and they lead me to thinking about process. Over the weekend I was working with a group that actually DOES this kind of work, and what we decided that what we were talking about was shaking out the existing network. It’s not so much a question of assembling pieces together in a network, but rather shaking things up a little bit so that a network (or a community) emerges.
There is a technique in astronomy that small telescope owners like me use for better seeing faint objects. You tap the tube of the scope and that little vibration is enough to cause the faint object to “pop out.” Your eyes see it and can then focus on it and work to resolve details of it.
A fourth principle I would add to Shawn’s list might be that once you have set the process in place, step back and participate as a member of the network instead of it’s controlling hub. A community that is sustainable has no one in charge of it. There is a role for a forming organization, but if you don;t get out of the way fast enough, the community will stick to you, making it dependant upon you for its continued existence. And that is NOT a community.
It’s a question of lead, follow AND get out of the way.
Technorati Tags: community, development, selforganization,
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Nice song in the style of an old American murder ballad.
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Lots of conversations back and forth and here is the latest iteration of the youth suicide prevention summit. I’ll be discussing this with the working group tomorrow and reflecting on further changes then.
- Word document: Summit design ideas
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On the day after the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment is released I stumble across this quote in an intersting passion play about Terry Sciavo:
“When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise ‘What interests me is me, or my organization, or my species,’ you chop off consideration of other loops [of the ecosystem]. You decide that you want to get rid of the by-products of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the eco-mental system called Lake Erie is part of your eco-mental system — and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated into the larger system of your thought and experience.
— Gregory Bateson”
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I was on a Skype call this morning with my friend Peggy Holman and we were noodling through the agenda for the summit I’m doing in May. Peggy and I are NOT linear conversationalists, and so whenever we talk we get into really delightful eddies and currents that do nothing to enhance our current productivity but which do make us better friends…
At any rate, we got talking about how the emergent process we use, like Appreciative Inquiry and Open Space and so on work well because they are based on how we human beings actually relate to and work with each other when we’re not thinking about it.
This morning I found this article in Worthwhile about JetBlue, another of the WestJet/SouthWest type airlines that seem to have a lock on customer service. Apparently, the CEO David Neelman was inspired by watching the way people were treated in a Brazilian village where he worked in a previous life. Of course this brought to my mind the story of Open Space Technology which Harrison Owen says began when he noticed the way things got done in a Nigerian village where he worked in the 1960s.
In the Worthwhile article, David Batsone asks:
“Why is it so hard to take the wisdom that we gain from our most meaningful personal experiences and translate them into good practice at the workplace? Most of the time we accept that is just the way the world of work operates. As a result, the company culture sputters along with its impersonal systems.
I challenge individuals to think differently. Personal lessons do not have to stay within our private borders. In fact, they are a fountain out of which flows our public creativity.
Neeleman inspires us to bring the best of who we are to the workplace so that we can bring more soul to our company culture.”
It should not be hard. Yesterday I had coffee with Jon Husband and Rene Barsalo of La Soci�t� des arts technologiques. Rene showed me an amazing slide which shows that human experience with technology. It looks at it in terms of generations, noting something like 1700 generations of experience with language before writing was invented. It has been 300 or so generations of writers, even fewer with the printing press and then the rapid fire changes brought on by telegraph, radio, TV, phones, faxes, computers and mobile technology. For well over 2000 generations, humans have evolved communication strategies that are based on synchronous conversation with someone you can see and touch and hear.
We have not yet evolved into homo wirearchus, and until we do, the best of who we are will continue to come from the best of who we have always been: small groups of people figuring stuff out together with conversation and personal contact. Technology can either serve that instinct or get in the way of it, and I believe THAT is the challenge we need to take up, in both the digital world and with the technologies of process and human interaction.
Technorati Tags: openspace, appreciativeinquiry, jetblue, communication, technology