Creating a Leading Community

Choose to be a Leading Community

A community is home to people of all walks of life. Because of this, community developing usually focuses on providing a little bit of something for everyone. The risk of this model is that a community ends up like every other community: average, unremarkable and perfectly acceptable.

There is another option: choose to be a leading community.

Choose to be the best for a specific tribe. By creating something remarkable, your community becomes noteworthy and attracts passionate people. Average then takes care of itself when remarkable is leading the way.

Two Factors Needed to Lead

In his book Tribes, Seth Godin highlights two things needed for one to become a leader:
1. A tribe

2. A vacuum

A Tribe

By tribe, Godin means a group of people that share a passion.

People who love Siberian huskies, avid readers, techies, thrifters and fishermen are all tribes. Obviously tribal affiliation is not limited. Someone might be a member of all of these tribes or may join or leave a tribe as their interests, geography or experiences change.

A Vacuum
A vacuum is when a tribe exists and is looking for someone to follow.

You might have a group of friends who play soccer and need to organize practice. This vacuum encourages someone to step up and start organizing. You meet other thrifters on Facebook and someone finally sets up a rummage sale Facebook group to sell products online. Vacuums like these produce leaders.

How to Lead

When we become a leader, we have an obligation to create remarkable products, otherwise our tribe will stop following us.

If we are the leader of the thrifting group on Facebook, and we don’t share interesting products, people will stop checking the page. If we are on the dog park planning committee and we design an ordinary dog park, few people will use it, and no one will talk about it.

As a leader, we can’t create ordinary products for ordinary people and expect success. However, this is how businesses and even communities have long thought. To please everyone, the products and services of a business and the features and activities of a community have been watered down to please everyone. Instead of creating a specific, unique product for a discerning tribe, most businesses and communities have focused on covering all their bases. For example, a city makes sure it has a big box retailer, a certain number of hotels and fast food restaurants, a movie theatre, a library, etc.

This model however creates a community that looks like every other community: average, unremarkable and perfectly acceptable.

That’s fine if you want to be average, but to get people talking, to get people excited and to attract the leaders that will make your city remarkable, this strategy isn’t enough.

Creating Remarkable

Elected leaders are often forced to create ordinary in an attempt to please everyone. We, as citizens, can please our tribe. We can create remarkable events or products that get our tribe excited, talking and participating.

What’s more, we don’t have to wait for permission. We don’t have to be elected as a leader. Wherever we see a vacuum and a tribe of people with a passion, we can lead them.

As Godin notes in his recent TED talk, Bob Marley didn’t invent Rastafarians, but he definitely led them. The Beatles didn’t invent teenagers. They merely decided to lead them.

We can look at our business or community and ask ourselves: where is there a vacuum that a tribe is waiting to be filled?

Examples of Remarkable

Forty years ago a few visionaries chose Boulder as the hub for the nascent organic food movement. This passion led by a few, attracted others who would go on to start their own businesses. Soon there was an entire tribe in Boulder focused on lifestyle and health that continues developing remarkable products and companies, while fundamentally transforming the dynamics of the community and attracting interesting people to live there.

In Hudson, WI the Little Free Library is a new initiative focusing on a tribe and a vacuum. The Little Free Library is an outdoor gathering place where people share their books and improve literacy in their community. It can be set up outside of someone’s home or in the middle of town. These mini-libraries create a place of momentary density and ideation as people walk by and swap books. While this is putting Hudson on the map, it also is helping other communities stand out as capitals of literacy and literature.

In Brookings we are doing the same thing. We want a community focused on creativity. What happens if we host thought-leaders on creativity, create courses around creativity and attract people and businesses that want to produce creative projects in the arts and industry?

We’ll find out. We’re starting by creating a remarkable claim: Brookings is the creative capital. Then we’re backing it up with an event: creativity week. Taking action by creating something remarkable for a specific tribe means we can immediately change our community to be a “leading community”.

Start with Remarkable

Average takes care of itself. Focusing a business or a community around a remarkable vision attracts a passionate tribe that cares. These engaged and involved individuals make a business or community great.

It’s time to be unique and remarkable. There are countless tribes looking for the best place to pursue their passion. Your business and your city could be the perfect place for them. What’s more, you can be the leader who makes it happen.

Don’t wait for permission. You already have it. Be remarkable and settle for nothing less.

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