New Research: Enterprise Community Programs Increase Strategic Impact

I believe that how organizations manage and operate needs to change in fundamental ways.

As technology has evolved, it has taken over much of the standardized work that humans used to do. In many ways, this is great because standardized production work is often drudgery combined with pressure. It does not spark joy even when it is tolerable. As humans do less production, work shifts to ambiguous tasks that rely on creativity and collaboration to create new or unique solutions based on a complex contextual factors.

People, however, cannot be managed or coerced into more creativity and collaboration. Creativity and collaboration is sparked and developed by social conditions that inspire and reward it. Working harder won’t increase or improve creativity – in fact, creativity and collaboration usually come from trying less and playing more. That is anathema to most people’s employment experience.

When I started The Community Roundtable in 2009, I had a hypothesis that community managers held the key to the future of management and organizational governance. Community managers have no ability to tell community members what to do – because members are not contractually bound to the community and or paid to be there – engagement is entirely optional. Yet online communities were demonstrating that significant value could be created without exerting control over people. The platform I am writing this on, WordPress, runs almost 40% of the ALL websites – and it is easier to use than any enterprise software I have experienced. Not only is it open source but it enables a community of developers to create thriving businesses in its ecosystem. It is not only powerful software – it is a powerful business model. It is hard to beat as a competitor. Clearly, there was something I could learn from online communities. Today we can identify and articulate the operational patterns of thriving communities. My hypothesis was correct; communities, and the people who manage them, have developed a powerful model from which all organizations can learn. Indeed, organizations must if they hope to survive.

In the past decade, community management has become a much more understood and documented discipline. It is a cross-disciplinary approach that integrates social, communications, technical, business, strategic, and leadership skills. Far from being the people who tweet, it requires a much more complex set of skills and no one can do it well on their own.

Community professionals manage the system, not individuals and develop the governance, which fosters constructive cultures. By understanding how behavior is influenced, they optimize environments to encourage and reward specific behaviors. This requires an interplay between infrastructure, social influence, governance, faciliation, and programming.

Community management  is very different approach than what we currently think of as management. It is a discipline that is practiced and done well by the best teachers, event planners, parents, executives, mayors, and ministers. In many cases it is more intuitive than explicit. The skills exist in the world, but are not often explicitly taught, cultivated, and rewarded especially not in many organizations. It’s time to change.