Community: Doing Significant & Impactful Things
The topic of community has consistently come up from different directions in recent weeks and months. It’s a big word. It hard to know where to jump in. We spin on a planet full of people and people create communities of infinite sizes, shapes, and colors. For this post, I want to focus on the singular core theme of impact.
The power of a community is anchored in many members coming together to do something significant and impactful. It has focus and it has energy. Some examples would be the Revolutionary War with Britain or the Allies fighting the totalitarian dictatorship of the Nazi’s Third Reich in World War II. Less violent examples might be the decades-long women’s suffrage movement to create the 19th amendment making it possible for women to vote or environmentally friendly building practices codified into a green buildings rating system like “LEEDS”.
Regardless of the target topic or movement, the common engine for each of them are people, coming together to amplify their combined effort and curiously equaling more than the sum of its parts. It’s a fascinating aspect to progress, growth, making things better, and becoming better.
One of the risks to falling off the path of community and risking leaving the best impacts unrealized is by over leveraging tools as opposed to people. A shovel is handy for digging but without the person gripping the handle and using their muscle, vision, balance, and energy to drive it into the ground, it would prove useless.
In many organizations we fall in love with templates, processes, platforms, and the promise of automation or mechanization for scaling and standardization. There can be many advantages to our industrialized DNA, but all these mechanics, tools, widgets, and linear processes need people to provide context and priority in the design and execution of any of the tools.
It’s common to observe avoidance of the people side of the equation and attempts are made to deploy a tool or structure to work around the more complex side of optimizing for focus and impact of people. The orchestration of people and tools is a dance, but people need to take the lead. The people engines of organizations do come with challenges that can be unique and mystifying at times but done well, building community and connecting that group of people to whatever tools are available for the cause, will yield exponentially more lasting and durable impact.