Alex Komoroske: commitment

Transcript context

…Communities are all about momentum. You want to have a space too small, a time too short. If you have a big cabinet space of a lot of people in it and no one's talking, people go, "I guess this is the place where we don't talk," for whatever reason. So what you're doing is you want the smallest seed of people that you know are going to be actively engaged. So maybe there's four of you that already talk over lunch and you talk about whatever topic and it's always really interesting and generative. Cool, get that group together and do a thing. And then incrementally add people who you think are going to like that already as it currently exists. And then you need to feed it so you want to make sure that it never dies. And a community with no people talking is definitely dead. A community with one person talking is already dead. You don't realize it yet. And so you're trying to maximize the chance that there's an interesting conversation even when you as the facilitator are not there. This takes some active policing by the... Like a garden has a gardener, there's somebody pruning back and saying, "Hey Jeff, just so you know, I think that came out a little bit strong to Sarah's idea and maybe next time add 'I wonder' to the front of that statement," or whatever. The other thing that you do is when people reach out to you and ping you, they go, "Hey, let's think about this thing," and you go, "That's a really interesting idea. You should share that in the group." And then they do. And then you engage in the group and say, "That was really interesting," little emoji response. And people who didn't watch the interaction assume that Sarah just decided proactively to stick her neck out and share that and that it worked. And so this becomes a self-sustaining norm in the community. And it's not a secret. It's not if someone asks, "Yeah, I told Sarah to share that," but people watching don't realize that. And so it becomes a place that people do take risks and feel comfortable sharing. The other thing you do is once a week or so, you want to make sure that you never propose something in the group that people go, "Eh." You always want to do a thing people go, "Yeah." So what you do is you see that if you're talking to other people, you say, "I wonder if we should have a live conversation every so often, right?" The chats were so fun, but it goes, "Would you come if I did one?" "Oh yeah, I would." "Okay, great." So now I say, "Hey, a few of us are talking. We're just going to do an experiment. We're going to have an hour-long conversation over lunch on Wednesday. Anyone in the group is free to come." And then what you do is you make sure it always has quorum because if it doesn't have quorum, then the thing, it looks like the community's dead. And then what you do is you send FOMO stuff afterwards. So you say, "Here's my notes from the thing," or, "Thanks Sarah, Jeff," blah, blah, blah, blah, "or an amazing conversation. e community's dead. And then what you do is you send FOMO stuff afterwards. So you say, "Here's my notes from the thing," or, "Thanks Sarah, Jeff," blah, blah, blah, blah, "or an amazing conversation. I thought the insight about," blah blah blah, "was so ridiculously amazing." So you want people who were in the group who didn't come to feel like they missed out and to come to the next one. And so you're constantly creating these kinds of vibes to how to do it. You can't do it if you don't have somebody with a lot of energy. I'm typically the seed crystal for a lot of the groups I'm in to start them off because I have a lot of energy, and I like, anything that people have to say that I think is open-minded or interesting, I like building on and "yes, and"-ing and that kind of gives the foundation that it can grow. But look for the people who already roughly want it. Don't try to convince somebody who doesn't want it to want it. They will not. They will ruin the whole thing. I just love this playbook for starting to build a little bit of community within a company. Have you written about this by the way? And if not, you should write a whole post about this.…

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