Last Updated Sunday, October 7, 2012

Community BuilderMasterclass

~ Version 2.0 ~

Lesson 0: Warmupmasterclass.indyhall.org

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Imagine this scene: 

You've spent weeks & months hunting and gather ing for people to start your community, hosting events and building a mailing list. You've been putting in so much work to help the community form, only to run out of steam.

You still don't have the makings of a community. Member prospects are wishy washy, people's attendance is sporadic, and you’re left to dream up ways to hopefully spur more interaction & participation. 

Exhausted, you can’t help but ask yourself:

"Where did I go wrong?"You don’t want to be

this guy.

Welcome

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Or maybe this sounds more familiar:

You’ve worked hard to organize a fantastic group of people. The energy level feels like a high... but only as long as you set a pace by beating that drum.

You’re starting to get worried about what happens if you skipped a beat. Can that energy stay high? Will it keep growing without you?

You are doing everything you can to keep up but you’re fast-approaching your own personal capacity. How did things go from feeling so great to feeling so stressful?

Wanting what’s best for the group, you wonder:

"How could I do more?"

Welcome

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Relax, you're not the first person to have found yourself in this place.

Communities are challenging to build and grow because they are, by nature, not in your control.

Communities are more like organisms than machines.

Which begs the question,

“How am I supposed to ‘build’ something that isn't in my control?”

The honest answer is that you don’t. The truth is that your role in your community isn’t what you’ve thought it is.

Unlike a house, building a community is an evolutionary, iterative process. In the place of walls,

which typically don’t move much once you’ve built them, the main structure of a community is the connections and relationships between people, which are constantly changing.

If you could plan for anything, it’s constant change and growth.

Your problem is that you have a business or organization that depends on community. Maybe you

have a website or a space to fill with a community. Maybe you have a personal or corporate mission

to achieve that depends on a community.  Maybe you have a cause or a problem that needs

community support.

Welcome

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When you build communities on your goal, your end game becomes the community’s blueprint. You approach it as if you

were building a house. Building a house from a blueprint is a

system you're likely familiar with: you plan & you execute. There

are only two outcomes of setting out to build a house: you succeed or you fail.

Masterful Community Building is a different system. This new

system is more like planting a garden than building a house. Like

a garden, communities need to be built for constant change and

growth. And while you can "mastermind" a garden until you are

blue in the face, it's the plants that do the all-important

execution, not you. A growing garden can produce countless outcomes, each one a slightly different shade of successful. 

You plant the seeds. You make sure that the soil is fertile.

You make sure that they're fed and watered.

But it’s the plants that do the growing.

“In organizations, real power and energy is generated

through relationships. The patterns of relationships

and the capacities to form them are more important

than tasks, functions, roles, and positions.”

-Margaret J. Wheatley

Welcome

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Why Look for Inspiration in Nature?

We’re clever creatures when it comes to problem solving,

something that our brains are uniquely wired for compared to

our relatives in the animal kingdom.

But our cleverness is no match for nature itself, which has been

hard at work for a LOT longer than we have, and has seen far

more problems and solutions than we can fathom.

As a result, nature’s solutions are less clever, but more effective

& sustainable. Nature’s solutions tend to be responsive &

designed to evolve. Sometimes, nature even lets “bad” things

happen long enough to become good things.

Nature doesn’t have a bruised ego or hurt feelings when its

solutions need more work, because nature is a system.

In this course, you’ll learn how to build a community that is a

living & breathing system, like the ones found in nature.

With a system at the foundation, your community can also be

effective & sustainable, responsive and designed to evolve.

Welcome

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The four lessons in this course correspond to the four key perspectives that you're going to learn to

use while becoming a Master Community Builder.

The process for using the Master Community Builder perspectives is set in this specific order because

each perspective builds on the results from using the perspectives before it.

Your personal strengths will draw you closer the perspective you're most comfortable with. At the

same time, there's going to be at least one perspective that you're inclined to avoid like the plague.

Buckle your seat belts, you’ll be leaving your comfort zones very shortly!

Your success will come from practicing & using all of the perspectives in the correct order.

Perspective 1:You, the member

Perspective 2:You, the storyteller

Perspective 3:You, the organizer

Perspective 4:You, the facilitator

Meet the Four Perspectives

Welcome

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Each Perspective Produces a Result

It helps to think of the perspectives as “lenses” that

you can switch between, a bit like going to the eye

doctor to get tested for a prescription.

Each lens provides a new focus level, and with each

focus level, you gain the clarity to produce a new

result.

These results come from effectively practicing each

perspective. The system for combining these results

is what produces consistently successful - and

consistently unique - communities along with the

ability to scale far beyond your own capacity.

Welcome

You, the memberUnderstanding the people you are already connected to

Looking for real Unfulfilled Needs

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3

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You, the storytellerTurning Unfulfilled Needs into achievable common goalsSharing Campfire Stories

You, the organizerHelping people stay focused on common goals

Designing for & supporting a spectrum of participation

You, the facilitatorRemoving roadblocks from the community’s growth

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One System, ∞ Outcomes, Consistent Success

There’s an inherent challenge in learning something emergent

and organic like community building. It seems impossible that

so many different communities could be built with just one set

of techniques.

What’s important to remember now that what you’re learning is not a blueprint. You’re learning a system, which means that the

outputs will be unique and vary based on the inputs.

Every community is unique because its inputs are unique.

A related reminder is, “garbage in, garbage out.”

The system you’ll learn in the Community Builder Masterclass is

designed to help you avoid putting garbage in, but that’s

ultimately up to you to do the work.

This system is built to give you the confidence of having

consistent, repeatable, and scalable successes in your

community building efforts.

Welcome

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Good Community Building is Habit Forming

Did you know that an average of 40% of the decisions you make

daily aren’t actually decisions, they’re habits? Habits are

“automatic decisions” that our brains are wired to make in order

to make us efficient. It’s an important part of how we survive.

We all know about bad habits like eating junk food and biting

our fingernails. Have you ever stopped to think about your bad

habits related to community building?

The system you’ll learn in this course will help you create good

new habits, and replace broken old habits.

All habits, good and bad, follow this pattern:

Cue Routine Reward

A trigger, internal or external to you

An action or series of actions

The thing you get at the end of the routine

The important thing to remember about creating and changing

habits is that you put the effort into changing the routine which

runs between your cue and your reward.

This book is on the Masterclass

Recommend Reading List

bit.ly/community-builder-reading

Even if you don’t buy this

class, buy this book.

bit.ly/power-of-habit

Welcome

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There’s only one way to actually embed a routine in your brain as a habit,

and that is practice. You need repeated and focused practice of the right routine in between your cue and your reward.

Your cues and rewards are personal to you, so I can’t tell you what they

are - but I can help you find them. Once you are aware of the cues and

rewards, you can practice the new routines that you’ll learn in this course

using the workbook exercises - and then you can take that practice out

into the real world and build amazing communities.

But that means that this isn’t a “kick back, read the lessons, do the

homework, chat with classmates” kind of class. It’s rigorous, challenging,

and sometimes frustrating. But it works.

“Honestly, I didn't really know what to expect coming into the class, but... it's given me a totally different view on literally everything I'm doing.”

- Conrad Decker, September 2012 Alum

Just knowing the process isn’t enough when you’re in the heat of

community building. You need to put in the practice, and build the new

habits in order to kick ass. It’s not magic. Conrad put in a ton of work.

You can too.

Welcome

“Change is easy. Improvement is far

more difficult” - Dr. Ferdinand Porsche

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Kicking Ass In This CourseThis course structure and format may be a bit different than you’ve

ever seen before, so we wanted to provide some recommendations for

getting the most out of our 30 days together.

1. Take Notes

Don't just read the lessons - print them out and take notes. Highlight.

Mark them up! Many PDFs have a wide right margin specially to give

you room to take notes. 

And when you're done marking them up, snap them into a 3 ring

binder for easy reference later. Get friendly with double-sided printing

to save paper!

It might sound like a strange thing to insist upon, but the act of

physically highlighting (with a marker, not a mouse) and writing

margin notes will help you study. Your brain processes your own handwriting differently than you process printed text.

As someone who hates his own handwriting, trust me, I wouldn’t

recommend this if it didn’t work.

Welcome

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2. Do the Workbooks Along With The Class

On the first day of week one you’ll receive the core course material - 4

weeks of lessons and workbooks.

You may read ahead if you wish, but I strongly encourage you to do the workbook exercises during the week of the assignments. This course

follows a process, and like any process if you do one of the early steps

incorrectly it can send a ripple effect through your work.

You might encounter a lesson or a workbook and think, “this doesn’t apply

to me.” Resist this urge. Each workbook in this class builds upon the

previous one, and skipping a workbook because you think you already

know the answer, or not doing the workbook completely, is only going to

hurt you in lessons to come.

Like taking notes, I'll recommend doing the homework on printed out

workbook sheets, and for all of the same reasons.

You might also have breakthrough realizations that there aren't specific to

the workbook questions. Note them quickly before you forget them - or

even better, share them on the Google Group with the rest of the class

during Show and Tell!

Welcome

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3. Share With the Class - Wednesdays are “Show and Tell”

This course is not a lecture. No points are awarded for attendance; the value you get

out of the course is proportional to what you put into it. I want you to think of this

class as a learning community that you're playing an active part in building. At ANY

time, you can send an email to the Google Group with an idea or a question.

But if you need a cue to share, Wednesdays are for “Show and Tell.”

Every Wednesday you are encouraged to share something with the class. It could be

something you’ve learned and written in your notes. It could be a link to an article or

video that you think your classmates would enjoy. It doesn’t even have to be about course material, it can be anything you want to share with your classmates.

Don’t stress yourself out about impressing anybody - your participation is all we

need to be impressed. Show and Tell is for sharing about yourself, your work, and

your life.

And the education continues: After our 30 days together, you’ll be invited into an

Alumni email list to continue this kind of discussion with other alumni. Also, as an

alumni, you are invited to retake as many future sessions of the Masterclass as you

like for no additional charge.

Once registered, you’re a Coworking Masterclass student for life!

Welcome

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4. Practice Looking for Signal in the Noise

There’s a “hidden” lesson in the Masterclass: listening.

Listening is the most powerful talent shared by successful

community builder. Being a Master Community Builder means

not only listening when it’s convenient, but always listening for

nuggets of gold. Even - and especially - when the noise levels

are high and the signal isn’t as obvious.

Depending on what you’re used to, this course is designed to

generate quite a bit of additional discussion. It may be tempting ignore the discussion and only focus on the lessons, workbooks, and your own coaching. This approach ensures that

you will miss the most valuable parts of the class.

You may need to set aside time for the mailing list, but whatever

you do, do not avoid it.

Only you know your email habits, so you’ll need to adjust

accordingly. If you need help keeping up, please ask! We’re

email pros, so we can teach you some tips to help you stay

involved.

Welcome

Sweet.Before we go any further, I want to

welcome you to the Community Building Masterclass.

Any questions?

Drop an email on the discussion list or email masterclass@indyhall.org

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October 7, 2012 - Version 2.0

• Improved/updated all artwork

• Tons of copy edits for clarity

• Introduced the Results Roadmap

• Introduced “The System”

• Introduced Habits & Practice mini-lesson

• Added Student Quote

• Updated “Kicking Ass” section

• Added read-ahead, but don’t work ahead recommendation• Added Show & Tell Wednesdays• Added signal-finding mini-assignment

Changelog