There was a cohort I joined that I still think about. It was one of the better ones. The sessions were brilliant. The learning was real. The people I met in that space were genuinely engaged with something that mattered. I even received transformational coaching from the facilitator.
And then… it ended.
I don’t mean the platform closed or the content disappeared. I mean the cohort ended, and with it, the feeling that we were going somewhere together. The space was still there. The people were technically still reachable. But the structure that had held us in relation to each other dissolved, and what replaced it was nothing.
I became lonely. I withdrew. Instead of taking what I’d learned forward, into practice, into relationship, into the next stage of becoming, I consumed it intellectually. I designed a great system. I just didn’t build a life with it.
Looking back, I know exactly what happened: I had been inside a course, not a community. And I couldn’t tell the difference while I was in it, because nobody told me there was a difference.
The blueprint problem
Building community, from the outside, looks like working toward a goal. A topic, a direction, a shared mission. The community exists to achieve something. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.
But picture the pitch deck.
Someone stands up and says: “We’re going to build a community of 10,000 people around X.”
Slide two.
- Who owns the blueprint?
- Who are the 10,000 people in that picture?
- And what happens when the builder moves on?
With building you put someone’s name on the structure. The builder holds the vision, and with it, the ceiling of what the community can become. The members can only exist within that vision. When the builder leaves, or when members grow beyond what the structure allows, the building doesn’t hold itself up any longer.
There’s also the problem of scale. What works for 20 people doesn’t automatically work for 100, let alone 1,000. Every person arrives at a different point in their journey. They need something different depending on where they are. If you don’t build for that, for the multiple layers of people at different stages, you’ll lose them the moment the community no longer serves where they are and what they need. The structure stays and the people drift.
A journey, not a judgment
I want to be clear: I’m not saying builders are doing it wrong.
You have to start somewhere. You need a focus, a structure, an offer clear enough to attract the right people. That’s building. And it works.
The question is what you do next.
Something draws you in. A question you’ve been carrying. A person. A feeling that somewhere in this space, something you need might actually be possible.
You arrive not knowing where you are. There’s a path, loosely marked — enough to take a first step, not so much that you can see the end. That’s intentional. The path is being made by the walking.
Over time something shifts. You stop looking for the structure and start moving within it. You find the people whose questions rhyme with yours. You practice — not performing, practicing. There’s a difference. Practice is what happens when you’re allowed to be wrong in front of people who want you to try again.
And at some point you can’t quite name, something you did here shows up somewhere else. In a conversation. In how you held something difficult. The community didn’t stay inside its own walls. You carried it out. Others brought the outside back in. Growth started moving in both directions.
That’s what it looks like when the conditions are right. Not built. Held. Practiced into existence.
My own path to this realization started earlier than most people might expect. I had the privilege to study cross-cultural management, fell in love with the debates about what’s meaningful, what’s right, what cultures are. Hofstede gave me language for something I’d been feeling. Then I started living it and the frameworks stopped matching the reality. Too rigid. Too frozen. My experience wasn’t lining up with it any longer.
Reading Zygmunt Bauman on liquid culture was the first crack in the wall. Culture isn’t a structure you inherit, it’s something you practice, negotiate, uphold. Nobody brings culture in; everybody brings culture in. We practice it. What I eventually understood, what became the core of my thesis, is that meaning-making happens before we’re even aware of it. The cultural layers we carry, our unconscious biases, our sense of what ought to be: that’s the very thing we have to work with.
I didn’t make the connection to community management immediately. But when it came, it came hard. The same rigidity I’d rejected in cultural models, I was watching it play out in communities all around me. A focus on what the community performs rather than what the community needs. Structures that served the vision of whoever built them, rather than the people inside them.
Community isn’t a product you build. It’s a practice you hold.
What conditions holding actually looks like
A community builder shows up on Monday with a plan. Their vision, or their leader’s. They work toward it. There’s value in that, direction matters. But there’s a ceiling.
A conditions holder shows up differently. They listen first, to the community, to where people are, to their challenges and stories and where they are on their own journey of becoming. Because yes, a community exists to achieve something; there’s an underpinning idea, a purpose. But simply being there together isn’t going to make it happen. You have to show up for it. Live and breathe it.
Everything a conditions holder does is oriented toward making the conditions for transformation. For the community to achieve what they set out to achieve, and more.
I genuinely believe that a builder places a ceiling on what a community can become. A conditions holder removes it. When people are allowed to show up as who they are, to challenge each other, push each other, practice together rather than be built, the community achieves things beyond what its creator ever imagined.
The tipping point, and this is the part most community leaders don’t plan for, is power. Fragility in a community is often concentrated in whoever holds the most of it: the owner, the creator, the loudest voice. The shift toward resilience happens when power becomes shared. When the community no longer depends on any one person to continue. When, if someone steps back, there’s no vacuum, just people who know how to hold space for each other and to carry on.
That’s not something you can build in advance. It’s something you practice into existence.
Why this matters now
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with how many communities are being run right now. Some of the ones that have been alive for years have outgrown the builder model without anyone naming it. They’re outliers, and they’re beautiful.
What troubles me is the selling. The framing that puts the leader’s goal first, that positions the community as a vehicle for someone else’s vision. It’s not unreasonable. But it’s also not fair to the members, who carry their own goals and timelines and reasons for showing up.
In the age of AI, what makes us human are our voices. Our ideas. Our journeys. How we bring things to life for ourselves and for the people around us. We all have a voice, unique, irreplaceable, and sometimes startlingly similar to someone else’s. We ought to practice that voice. Dare to speak what we haven’t said before, bring to light what we haven’t been willing to admit.
In a community with enough psychological safety, enough warmth and challenge, those voices ripple outward, through people’s own lives, through the lives of people around them, perhaps even on scales beyond what anyone imagined.
Paradigm shifts happen through people connecting. In one of your communities right now, there might be someone quietly synthesizing ideas in a way that’s going to change things. They just need the conditions for it to be naturally brought to light.
An invitation
This is an invitation. For you, the one who shows up Monday morning and feels the gap between what you’re doing and what you know is possible.
Whether you’re an enthusiast, the right hand to a creator, managing customer or employee communities inside an organization, a platform holder, a steward of a CoP, a cohort facilitator, or just someone who cares deeply about a small group of people with no real formal structure, this is for you.
Next time you open your community, ask:
- What’s going on?
- What’s happening with people?
- What are they looking for?
- What am I looking at?
Get to know the people in your community more intimately than you have before. Understand their pains, their challenges, their troubles, not as problems to be fixed, but as signals of who they are and what they’re carrying. See the person. Let them feel heard. Let them feel seen. Let them feel respected.
Most of us start as builders. We have to — someone needs to hold the vision at the beginning. That’s not the problem.
The shift doesn’t happen all at once. It happens the first time you listen before you plan. The first time you let the community take you somewhere you didn’t expect. The first time someone you never anticipated becomes the one holding space for someone else.
Stop asking “how do I grow this?” Start asking “what does this need from me right now?”
That’s the practice. It starts Monday morning.