By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder and Principal, The Community Roundtable
Note: This post was originally posted on Rachel’s Linkedin page.
Training for a marathon is complex. What makes you successful is simple. Establishing the behavior that makes you successful is hard.
While it wasn’t a marathon, over the long weekend I ran my first 10K. The run itself was anti-climatic. I felt good, I ran fine but not great and, most importantly, I finished. There was nothing notable in my performance. Except….
… except it represented four years of persistence, experimenting, starting, stopping, restarting and putting one foot in front of the other. Again and again.
Becoming a runner who can run 5+ miles is a complex behavior change. It’s not easy. But it’s also not complicated. It requires doing one simple thing frequently – putting one foot in front of the other. Establishing that behavior – finding the time to do it, making it a regular habit and sorting out an optimal pace, clothing, routes and apps that support/reward the behavior is hard. You have to become an expert at expiramenting, re-starting and re-committing. But the actual mechanics of running are simple.
Communities are complex. What generates community value is simple. Establishing behaviors that generate value is hard.
Running and establishing successful communities have a lot in common – it’s partially why I tackled the running, so that I had first-hand experience with establishing a complex behavior change.
Healthy communities are incredibly complex – full of different people with different agendas; packed with content, discussions and events; and constantly rotating leadership as the situation demands. They are complex adaptive systems. However, what generates community value is simple; value is generated when people share their experiences, ask good questions and respond to others’ questions.
In both cases, with running and communities, it took a lot of time understanding their complexity to understand their simplicity – and to understand what behaviors were the keystone behaviors off of which everything else depends. This insight – born of years of experience – makes it easy to measure community progress, ROI and success.
I’m excited to share these insights and more at the Higher Logic Super Forumnext week and the FeverBee Sprint conference in November. Join me!
