You're Building Community Wrong. Here's What Actually Works.

There's this scene that plays out constantly in corporate offices across the world: A group of smart people in expensive chairs agrees that "community" is important for innovation. They nod seriously. They schedule working groups. Someone mentions engagement metrics. Everyone leaves feeling like they've accomplished something.

Then nothing happens.

The problem isn't that they don't understand community. It's that they think community is something you can design from above, a structure you can impose on people like an org chart. They imagine community as this unified thing with clean boundaries and predictable behaviors. And if they're really ambitious, they build a Slack channel or a team lunch event to "foster" it.

But that's not how community works. That's how bureaucracy works.

I recently talked to Dan Ryan, who manages community at Stone & Chalk, an innovation hub in Adelaide, Australia. What's interesting about Dan isn't that he has some fancy community framework—he doesn't. What's interesting is that he understands something most people get completely backwards: Community isn't about proximity. It's about repeated, intentional connection.

And more importantly, it's about making people give a damn.

The Loneliness Crisis Nobody Talks About

Here's a thing Dan mentioned that stuck with me. He manages a hub full of tech founders and entrepreneurs. You'd think these people would naturally gravitate toward each other, right? Especially in a space literally designed to bring them together.

Except they don't.

Dan describes walking past the coffee machine and seeing a line of 10 people waiting for their shot—every single one on their phone, some with headphones on, completely isolated from the person standing next to them. Two of them were working on machine learning. Two of them faced similar technical problems. They never spoke to each other.

This isn't unique to Adelaide. I see this in every corporate environment I work with. People surrounded by potential collaborators, yet completely alone.

The isolation is real. And it's not because people are antisocial. It's because nobody has created the friction necessary to make connection happen. Without that friction, without someone literally saying "Hey, you two should fucking talk," most people default to their phones.

So Dan became the friction. At Stone & Chalk, he doesn't wait for organic connections. He runs town halls where people share wins. He organizes table tennis tournaments. He creates moments where introductions have to happen. And once they do? Once people actually meet? The magic is unavoidable. They see alignment. They see problems they can solve together.

The community didn't exist until Dan made it impossible to avoid.

Why Your Community Program Is Actually Killing Your Culture

Most organizations approach community building like it's a marketing department problem. They think: "How do we create the appearance of a tight-knit group?" They host Friday happy hours. They send out surveys. They celebrate "company culture" in recruiting materials.

But culture and community aren't the same thing.

Dan nailed this when he talked about working inside large corporations trying to integrate startup partnerships. He'd help facilitate these exciting moments—companies would run innovation challenges, startups would pitch amazing ideas, there'd be genuine momentum. And then reality would hit.

The startup would win the challenge. Excitement everywhere. And then they'd get handed a hundred-page legal document written for Cisco. They'd meet with an engineer who looked at them like they were idiots questioning his process. There was no follow-through. No cultural embrace of what just happened. The innovation department got excited, but the rest of the organization didn't shift an inch.

This is the innovation theater problem most companies have. You can create all the formal structures of community, but if the underlying culture doesn't change, none of it matters. You end up with employees going through motions, participating in forced activities, while secretly knowing the organization will crush anything that threatens the status quo.

Here's what Dan learned: Culture isn't something you design. Culture is what you reward. It's what happens when no one's watching. And if you want community to exist inside a large organization, you have to ask yourself an uncomfortable question: Am I actually willing to change how people are rewarded and evaluated?

Most organizations answer no. Then they act shocked when employees don't suddenly become "more innovative."

The Pay-It-Forward Problem

At Stone & Chalk, every startup that pitches to get in goes through the same interview. And Dan always asks the same question: "What does pay-it-forward look like to you? What can you offer? How will you embody this concept?"

It's not flowery language. It's not some corporate buzzword nonsense. It's a direct question: Are you willing to give, or are you just here to take?

Because here's the uncomfortable truth Dan discovered: The best communities are cults.

I know that word makes people uncomfortable. But think about what makes a cult work. There's a clear shared narrative—a reason everyone's there. There's a defined set of values and behaviors. There's accountability. Everyone who joins knows they're part of something bigger than themselves. And crucially, there's an expectation that you contribute, not just consume.

Most organizations want the benefits of a cult without the commitment. They want people to be passionate and aligned and willing to go the extra mile. But they don't want to ask for it directly. They don't want to clearly articulate what the community stands for.

Dan's question—"What does pay-it-forward look like?"—is actually the key to building something real. When you ask people to articulate what they'll give before they join, two things happen. One, you filter out the takers. Two, you set an expectation from day one that this isn't about what you get. It's about what you contribute.

That's not manipulation. That's honesty. And honesty is the foundation of actual community.

The Relationship Problem Nobody Admits

Dan mentioned something that surprised me when he talked about working with corporates. He said one of the biggest lessons he learned is that corporate-startup partnerships almost always fail because the relationship work doesn't get done right.

Think about how you introduce friends to each other. You don't send them a text with both their contact info and say "figure it out." You do groundwork. You check timing. You make sure both people are actually available and interested. You pay attention to the vibe. You introduce them in a way that gives them something to talk about.

But corporates and startups? They skip all of that. They run a challenge. A startup wins. And then they expect an instant business relationship to materialize. No wonder it fails.

What Dan discovered is that the people making these partnerships work aren't the innovation managers. It's the mid-level decision makers. The procurement people. The operations leads. The people who are actually going to have to live with whatever relationship gets built. If those people aren't committed, the whole thing dies in the water.

This is true for community inside organizations too. You can have an amazing innovation team. But if the middle managers don't believe in what you're building, if they don't see how it serves their interests, community never takes root. The innovation group stays isolated. A little island of enthusiasm in an ocean of status quo.

The path through isn't more energy or better marketing. It's relationships. Real, high-touch relationships with the people who actually control resources.

Why This Matters

You're probably not going to build a community of 140 startup entrepreneurs. Most people won't. But the principles Dan lives by are universal:

Community doesn't happen by accident. It happens when someone gives a shit enough to create friction—to literally force people to connect until connection becomes habit.

Culture is reflected in what you reward. If you want people to collaborate, make collaboration the path of least resistance. If you want people to contribute, make contribution an entry requirement, not an afterthought.

The best communities are transparent about what they stand for. They ask for commitment. They don't pretend you can be part of something meaningful while staying completely detached. Cults and actual movements both understand this. Most organizations are too afraid to ask.

And finally: Relationships matter more than systems. You can have perfect processes. But if the people executing them don't care, you get bureaucracy. You get the performance of community, not the thing itself.

The Question

Here's what stuck with me most from talking with Dan. He said something simple: Innovation is incredibly complex. There's not even really a recipe.

Most people hate that answer. We want frameworks. We want steps. We want to know exactly what to do to get the outcome we want.

But maybe that's the real problem. Maybe the reason your community programs fail isn't because you're missing some tactic. It's because you're looking for a recipe when what you actually need is judgment. Judgment about people. Timing. What your organization actually needs versus what it claims to need.

And that's something you can't learn from a course.

Want the Full Story?

Dan Ryan's insights on building real communities inside organizations come from years of work across six continents, from the UN to Oxford to Stone & Chalk in Adelaide. If you want to hear the full conversation—including how to identify the real decision makers in corporate partnerships and why geographic proximity doesn't matter as much as you think—listen to Yaniv Corem's interview with Dan on The School of Innovation podcast.

Because here's the truth about building community: Everyone says it's important. Very few people are willing to do the actual relational work it requires. And almost nobody is willing to ask directly: What are you willing to give?

The question is: Which kind of person are you?