Building community in a place that has no time for it

I used to say, half as a joke, that if everyone was eighty per cent happy, we had done a good job. It is not a line people love to hear. When you lead something that many people care about, each of them naturally hopes you are working toward their hundred. But I still think it is the truest thing I know about building community in a complicated environment, and I have had time to decide whether I believe it.

I do. It turns out a Nobel laureate got there first. Herbert Simon, the economist who studied how organizations actually make decisions, argued that in the real world people do not optimize, they “satisfice”: they look for a course of action that is good enough, because the perfect one either does not exist or cannot be found in the time available.1 He was describing administrators in 1947. He could have been describing any manager on a Tuesday.

The mistake I see most often, and made myself, is treating community as something you build from the outside in. You announce a program, you invite people, you measure who came. It looks like community. It photographs like community. But the thing itself takes time, and time is the one resource a business-driven environment refuses to give you.

That is the real tension. Business runs on reaction: the season, the quarter, the complaint that came in this morning. Community runs on the slow accumulation of trust. Those are two different mindsets, and most organizations are only built for one of them. The pressure is always to do something now, and doing something now is how you end up with a calendar full of events and no community underneath it.

The answer I have come to is that community starts inside the organization, not outside it. Before you can hold a community together, your own house has to be paddling in the same direction: the board, the staff, the people who answer the phone. If they are not, every stakeholder you meet will find the gap and stand in it.

This is not a soft idea. The service-profit chain, the Harvard Business School framework that has shaped service management for thirty years, makes the same claim in the language of business: internal quality drives employee commitment, which drives the customer's experience, which drives the results.2 The research on internal branding says it more bluntly: employees who believe in what the organization stands for behave consistently with it, and no amount of training produces that belief if the organization itself is not aligned.3 The customer meets your culture before they meet your product. Your stakeholders meet it before they meet your strategy.

But there is a trap on the other side too. If you wait until the inside is perfect before you open the doors, you never let new voices in, and the community you eventually build is a club. The work is to do both at once, badly at first, and keep going.

Community is not a clique. It is not one thing everybody has to agree on. A place can hold many communities at the same time, and the sign that it is working is not that everyone is doing the same thing, but that everyone can find something that feels like theirs. Give people a space, a place, and an identity, and they will individualize it. You do not have to design one generic experience for everyone. You have to leave room.

I am not a fan of doing things by committee, and I want to be precise about what I mean, because it is easy to hear that as not liking engagement. Engagement is essential. Public feedback is essential. What does not work is treating every decision as a vote among infinite options.

The evidence on this is well known outside planning circles and strangely ignored inside them. In a famous 2000 study, shoppers offered six varieties of jam were far more likely to buy one than shoppers offered twenty-four; more choice drew more attention and produced fewer decisions.4 Two decades of follow-up research have qualified the effect, but the core finding holds: past a certain point, more options mean less action and less satisfaction with whatever is finally chosen.5 Anyone who has run a public consultation with a blank page and a flip chart already knows this. Ask a hundred stakeholders for an open opinion and you get a hundred opinions, and then you get nothing built.

Good engagement offers real choice, but it offers a choice between a few things someone has already thought hard about. That is not tokenism. Sherry Arnstein's ladder of citizen participation, the standard the field has used since 1969, is a warning against consultation as window dressing, where people are asked and then ignored.6 The answer to window dressing is not infinite choice. It is honest choice: a small number of genuine options, a clear account of what was decided and why, and a seat at the table for the people who did not get their way. That means somebody has to decide, and somebody has to be willing to be wrong in public. If you are doing it for the right reasons, that is bearable. Not comfortable, but bearable.

Here is the pattern I keep coming back to. Most complex environments contain at least two stakeholder groups that are similar enough to share a space and different enough to want it arranged differently. There is a moment when the first group is unhappy because the second is getting what it asked for, and another when the second is unhappy because the first is. Whoever is not the centre of attention this season can feel that the place has been arranged for someone else, and from where they stand, that is a reasonable thing to feel.

There is no arrangement in which both groups are fully satisfied. There never will be. That is not a failure of leadership; it is the nature of anything shared by people whose interests genuinely differ. Management theory has known this for forty years. Stakeholder theory, the framework that reframed the firm as answerable to everyone with a stake in it rather than to shareholders alone, begins from the premise that those stakes conflict and that managing the conflict is the job, not a distraction from it.7 The most cited paper in the field goes further: managers cannot attend equally to every claim, so they weigh stakeholders by their power, the legitimacy of their claim, and the urgency of their need, and that weighting shifts over time.8 Which is a formal way of saying that whoever is the centre of attention this season will not be next season, and that this is how the model is supposed to work.

What you can do is make sure the direction is clear and honestly explained, that everyone knows what was decided and why, and that the people who lost this round are still at the table for the next one. Eighty per cent happy, all paddling the same way, beats a hundred per cent happy in three directions.

There is no arrangement in which both groups are fully satisfied. There never will be. That is not a failure of leadership.

I have learned to tell two kinds of hard environments apart.

In the first, the work is simply work. You put in the time, you walk the beat, you show up to the meetings you were not required to attend, and slowly people come with you because they can see you believe in what you are doing. Most complex stakeholder environments are like this, and they reward patience.

The second is different. There are situations where history has already decided the answer for people, and no study, data, or reasoned explanation will change it. That is not a judgement on anyone; long memories are earned. But pretending otherwise wastes the energy you need for the people who can still be reached. In those environments you make the changes you can make with the support you have, knowing you will be paddling upstream the whole way. That is not defeatism. It is knowing where to spend yourself.

What that kind of environment needs is not just funding but real support, groups genuinely working together rather than each holding the solution.

Does any of this get solved quickly? No. You move the needle. Some of the movement is visible: a space people now use, a program that runs, a partner who stayed. Some of it is not: a relationship that held, a meeting that went better than the last one, a staff member who stopped dreading Mondays.

That last one is the measure I trust most. If your team is good, if the people inside the organization feel supported and are pulling together, the community outside has something to attach to. If they are not, no amount of programming will cover for it.

And there is a point, in any hard place, where you have done what can be done, and the honest thing is to say so. Knowing where that point is might be the last skill on the list, and the hardest one to learn. I am still learning it. But I would rather have spent myself on a place that mattered, and be eighty per cent happy with what it became, than have played it safe and left it exactly as I found it.

Sources

  1. Simon, H. A. (1947). Administrative Behavior. Macmillan; and Simon, H. A. (1956). Rational choice and the structure of the environment. Psychological Review, 63(2), 129–138.
  2. Heskett, J. L., Jones, T. O., Loveman, G. W., Sasser, W. E., and Schlesinger, L. A. (1994). Putting the service-profit chain to work. Harvard Business Review, 72(2), 164–174.
  3. Burmann, C., and Zeplin, S. (2005). Building brand commitment: A behavioural approach to internal brand management. Journal of Brand Management, 12(4), 279–300.
  4. Iyengar, S. S., and Lepper, M. R. (2000). When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995–1006.
  5. Chernev, A., Böckenholt, U., and Goodman, J. (2015). Choice overload: A conceptual review and meta-analysis. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 25(2), 333–358.
  6. Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35(4), 216–224.
  7. Freeman, R. E. (1984). Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. Pitman.
  8. Mitchell, R. K., Agle, B. R., and Wood, D. J. (1997). Toward a theory of stakeholder identification and salience: Defining the principle of who and what really counts. Academy of Management Review, 22(4), 853–886.