Stage Three - My Mistakes Were Made For You
"There are leaders, and there are those who lead. We follow those who lead not for them, but for ourselves" Simon Sinek
This week instead of following the story of Dave, I’m going to talk a little from personal experience. I’ve been building communities for several years with varying degrees of success, so I thought it would be a sensible opportunity to let others learn the easy way what I – at times – learned the very hard way.
I assume it wont come as a surprise that my own story mirrors Dave’s somewhat. There were times earlier in my career where I felt that I was alone and constrained by the limitations of the team around me. That my learning and professional development had an environment induced ceiling that I couldn’t break through alone. I realised (not in these words obviously) that what I wanted was people around me who cared about getting better at our craft, and to feel like I was part of a community. I’d joined the Ministry of Testing, been to TestBash and plenty of meetups, and I felt that I had a rough idea of what I wanted to be part of. And I decided that if I wanted to have that around me, I was going to have to build it myself.
Before we dive in I should warn you, some of the things I tried don’t make me look terribly good. I didn’t have an experienced someone around me to point out the mistakes I was making, and some of them are pretty epic. Try not to judge!
The first community that I tried to build – years before covid-induced lockdowns and commonplace remote working – was virtual. I knew I wanted to meet other experts and practitioners and as I knew those people I worked with who I deemed to be ‘experts’ (I did warn you that I don’t come off well in some of these!), I was going to have to look further afield. So I started a Slack group. The Testing Network Slack group specifically; a place for experts who wanted to learn and grow together and share their expertise with other experts. I invited those who I thought were skilled software testers so that we could learn from each other, with the instruction to invite anyone else they thought were ‘experts’ to broaden our collective network. Somewhat predictably, this didn’t take off. Just a poorly populated inactive Slack group, filled with nothing but black hole levels of cringe at the premise of it all.
Unperturbed, I decided to try again. I decided that the problem with version one must have been the exclusivity – an invitation only group may have sounded like a good idea to someone who clearly had no idea what they were doing, but it clearly wasn’t the way to get what I wanted. This time I would make it open to all and because I am ever the opportunist, I had found a gap in the market. The Testing Network 2.0 was an open-to-everyone Facebook group for software testers to share ideas and opportunities with each other. I’d realised that not everyone had to be an expert to be part of a community, and seeing as exclusivity hadn’t worked, I would invite and include as much of my existing network as possible. And that was how I found myself the owner of a Facebook group of nearly 250 people, with virtually no activity, discussion or sharing whatsoever.
At this point I was pretty confused. I had built it and they had come, so why wasn’t it working? This time though I wasn’t going to rip it up and start again, I was going to persevere. I was certain this was going to work, all it needed was a little push. So I started spamming. I was going to provide content for people to engage with. I started posting a Question of the Week every Monday. I made a point every morning of reading and finding a blog post that I could share with everyone. I would research conferences and share links to them. I lived my life just waiting for a notification on my phone that someone had replied or commented to something I’d posted, just so I could jump on it straight away and offer some encouragement and positive re-enforcement. I was setting the example, living the behaviours that I wanted from the members. Still it wasn’t working. It was just me, shouting into the void with barely a whisper and occasional echo coming back to me. I always had the last word in the discussion as no one cared enough to keep it going. Once or twice someone shared a link to something and I was overjoyed, but they rarely bothered to do so a second time as, realistically, they only ever got one comment or reply. From me.
Weathered as I am by time and experience, I can now reflect on these initial first steps and can see why they weren’t working. Unlike my thinking at the time, it wasn’t the format that was the problem but the delivery. Since then I’ve worked with and been part of communities in these exact moulds (well not Facebook – I don’t go there anymore) and they have been both wildly successful and provided meaningful value to their members. The time I spent reading blogs in search of things to share helped me grow my expertise, and learning about new conferences helped me find new opportunities and networks in the future. I realise now that what was missing from those early efforts was a sense of alignment behind a collective and uniting goal and purpose.
Simon Sinek famously refers to this as your Why – the answer to the question why should I be part of this? Why should I spend time doing this? Why do I want to belong to this group? I don’t question Sinek’s views here, and I choose to think of it as purpose. I always advocate for and encourage that one of the first activities a fledgling Community of Practice should do is spend time thinking about what it is that brings them together and unites them – what the purpose is for the group and what they can achieve it together. Doing this early on gives a reason to those who came to stick around and those who discover you to want to join. Alignment is everyone facing in the same direction, working towards the same goals, being clear about what they want to achieve by being part of the group. Crucially, this gives members and potential members a choice – is this something I want to be part of or not? Those that decide they do make the choice to be invested in the community. They understand and choose to accept what is expected of them. They choose to be part of something together.
This is all easier said than done of course. As I wrote about previously, this beginning often comes down to a moment of someone being prepared to show some vulnerability and be prepared to go first. To be the one who is prepared to tell a group of people who may or may not share that opinion that they want something. With this in mind, the most important thing a leader (or potential leader) can do in the early stages of meeting is to create safety amongst the group. To get to the point where someone is comfortable enough to put their hand up as quickly as possible, and allow the process of alignment to begin.
Whenever I’m talking to someone who is trying to start a new Community of Practice, I encourage them to do two things. Firstly, I tell them that they should have a 70-80% idea of what they hope the value from the community should be. That way they have a clear enough idea of what the potential community could be that they can articulate it to others, but with enough flexibility that the group can come together to form that purpose around themselves. Second, start with a lean coffee. As we said above, at this point in its lifecycle the goal is to get people comfortable enough in each other’s company to begin opening up, and frankly I haven’t found a better way of doing this than using a Lean Coffee session. People can very quickly find out if they are with other likeminded people, whether they are in a group they want to be around and be part of, and very rapidly begin to iterate and understand the things that (as a group) they want to talk about.
The next stage of Communities of Practice we’ll look at the practicalities of growing and maturing a Community of Practice, and using an approach that was introduced to me as ‘offsite culture’ to decentralise the leadership activities and create a group strategy.
If you’ve found this interesting, I did a talk on a very similar subject for the Ministry of Testing which can be found on their website. I even did slides for that one!