Community
Welcome everyone! This post is part of my wider series on how to implement low-code not just from a technology and process perspective, but also for a people enablement and adoption perspective to truly maximise value from the platform - This post gives an overview of the structured approach I’ve defined and how I’m breaking down my blog posts
Holistic Low-Code Enablement - Blog structure and navigation — EmPOWER Your World
You’ll have seen at the core of the ‘Maker Movement’ cycle is ‘Community’ - But what does this mean? Why is it important? Why should someone want to be part of one? How can we maximise the value of our Community?
Let’s explore by starting to look at what a community is! A community in our context is a way of bringing together people with a shared interest and passion to collaborate across the organisation to help people understand, to learn, to grow, and to promote successes and stories to help establish, enable, and reinforce the new behaviours we’re trying to grow.
One of the central concepts is connecting people to share and learn from each other, no matter where in the organisation, what level, what role they’re in. Einstein described it as “Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t” That could be how to identify use cases, technical knowledge, governance knowledge, architectural knowledge, security knowledge, privacy knowledge, value measurement knowledge…. Anything!
Ok, so all that sounds interesting and important… But why a community? Why can’t we just talk to each other? Well there’s some theory behind that!
Firstly there’s ‘Metcalfe’s Law’ which says that as the number of people in a network increases the value of that network by the square of the number of members. In short - the bigger we grow our community the greater the value it will have!
Could we achieve that without a community? Maybe! But if we rely on just the people we know we can only go so far Dunbar hypothesised that it’s not possible to maintain an unlimited number of relationships - Dunbar’s number is the maximum number of 1:1 valuable relationships that we’re able to maintain. He proposed this number to be 150. This number is across our whole life.
We might start with a small group community where we can maintain those relationships. We might start with face to face relationships / community. Even as our community grows these localised small groups are a strong way to give local support and development.
As the community grows we need a way to fill that gap between the number of relationships we can maintain and the maximum value we could gain by making that number of people bigger. We can build many to many relationships using digital platforms!
Well those were famous theories… Here’s one from someone somewhat less famous… Me! 😁
I started think about how much of adopting platform involves People, Platform, and Process so I started thinking about establishing a community through this lens… People could be any of those people with different types of knowledge. Process is the framework or structure around how we do it and enable it. Platform technology is the digital world where we can bring people together across countries, business units, functions.
Community intersects all three parts but is weighted 80:20 in the direction of people. They’re the most important part of your community. Everything else you can ‘wing it’ to an extent… To start with at least! 😁
That community enables a number of things… Emotions, behaviours, somewhere people feel they belong, somewhere fun. It’s a leveller of hierarchies, a destroyer of siloes! But to unlock those things we need to establish the right culture! A safe space to ask the ‘stupid’ questions, a safe place to share and help, somewhere people can have fun and where things don’t need to be too serious.
That culture piece is really important. It’s often considered that “Knowledge is Power” (I was heard someone say that they’d only ever heard it said “Knowledge is Power, France is Bacon” but had never understood the ‘Bacon’ reference… Not realising the quote was by Francis Bacon! 😂 Anyway… I digress…) however the culture we’re trying to establish is not that Knowledge is Power but that the sharing of Knowledge is Power. That helping each other is power! This is best brought to life through the words of Vivek Bavishi who established the #PowerAddicts movement - “We rise by uplifting others!”
And we should approach community with the (slightly adapted) words of JFK in our mind… “Ask not what your community can do for you, but what you can do for your community”
It’s a lovely thought that everything will happen for altruistic reasons and we’ll all hold hands and sing a happy song together but perhaps people might also like to help themselves at the same time as others.
Maslow (another great thinker with a recognised model like Metcalfe and Dunbar) came up with a model of motivation called the ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ which proposed that unless people have their essential needs met (like food, water, shelter) then they can’t progress up his pyramid through different levels, to ultimately be the best version of themselves that they can be.
Inspired by his pyramid I thought about community, and the platform, in the same way - with a basic need of wanting to try to do their job better, easier, more simpler, to then wanting to improve that task for others, to then improve themselves and ultimately be all they can and help others…. The real world isn’t as cleanly layered as this, of course, but it gives a way to think about how people’s behaviours and actions may change as they submerge themselves deeper into the platform and we can think about the Value model I shared in a previous post might align to those layers too!
So… We now have a view of
What ‘community is’
Where it fits in helping us achieve our goal of growing adoption and enablement
How technology, process, and people, come together to enable community behaviours and feelings, supported by the culture we need to establish to help it to happen
What different stages of community / platform might look like and where it aligns with the value model
We’re next going to have a look at some ideas for how we can generate traffic INTO the community to attract more members (and increase the value of it by a square of that number) and traffic WITHIN the community to provide value, and fun, to it’s members
To attract people TO the community we have various options we might use - Essentially through all of these we’re trying to leave breadcrumbs to make it appealing, interesting, intriguing, fun, to follow them and come and see what it’s all about!
Some of these include things like our day to day conversations. Let’s tell people about it, about the platform, about the stories we’re hearing about the people and the technology! We can also push those same things out through formalised comms plans and comms channels!
We can also participate in other communities and forums and listen for opportunities that the platform could address, or help with, and tell people to post / share that same information or question in our community!
We can use data to promote our community and movement…. If we’re growing our number of members then shout about it! People may get FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and want to come and investigate what others are doing! We can also use data to automate messages and tell people about our community - If I make my first solution I should receive a message welcoming me to the platform, telling me where I can find self service info, where I can connect with other people like me who are happy to help and share!
Something I’ve not mentioned yet - and I’ll get into in a later post is Branding and Theming of our community and how that can be a powerful tool in our building of a community too! I’ve mentioned previously the ‘Power Rangers’ community that I started! This is an example of that and how an non-corporate approach can prompt additional interest and intrigue through an organisation!
So that gets new people through the door… What keeps new people there? What keeps existing members coming back and interacting? Content! We want it to be active, to be responsive to their needs, to be full of interesting and inspiring information, to be a nice, friendly, fun and happy place to be!
We can provide some of that traffic or prompts for it to happen by doing things like asking questions and for opinion or feedback, by running competitions, scheduling events, by posting learning resources, by sharing stories - and in it’s early days it’s likely to be us out there trying to creating the culture of sharing that we’re looking for… but as it grows, and as people feel that kind, supportive, helpful, fun culture we want to encourage them to post their content and ask / answer questions too! Over time this becomes self sustaining as that number of passionate particpants increases and our champions start to emerge! (We’ll talk Champions another day! 😁)
I hope you’ve seen from this post that communities are ESSENTIAL to our Power Platform Adoption and Enablement and why it’s placed in the Maker Movement! Done well communities are life changing! The people you meet, the relationships you build, and opportunities you generate, and the lives you might change are HUGE!!! Communities - both inside your organisation and outside are AWESOME and have changed my life!!! I’d love to hear your thoughts and experience of community! 😊
