As the ABV pilot is winding down with our three clients, the ABV team is turning towards the question of “What’s next?”
Part of the answer lies in treating ABV as the fourth client.
What does this mean? I’m the client and the ABV team is taking me through the paces of exploring my story and related wisdom, of figuring out how to attract and build an ABV community of kindred spirits using networking, marketing, and technology. And quite frankly, always in the background for me is how to monetize after the community is formed. I don’t think I could call myself an entrepreneur if I wasn’t thinking about the monetization piece, even if it’s not something I will be acting on immediately.
There’s a nice creative tension between myself and Beth, the ABV consultant on community-building. Beth reminds me that the focus is on building the community first and that I should expect the wild ride that comes with a community. Beth has a long history in the non-profit world. She understands deep in her bones the unpredictable and glorious outcomes that come from a community. She knows that the more you try to control a community, the farther off you veer from digging where the real gold is. She keeps me honest.
Back to ABV as the fourth client. I’m almost finished with the Full Expression work. One of my pieces of wisdom, something I believe but that I could never “prove” like I would a theorem in math is this:
“Wisdom comes from unexpected places, and it can change the world.”
It’s why I have a visceral reaction when I run into an innovator who has remarkable ideas, stuff that makes me marvel and wonder who else could benefit from hearing those ideas. This was the driving force in taping interviews with my friend, Ilene Kouzel, as she was dying of ALS (aka Lou Gehrig’s disease). I knew that the way Ilene was talking and thinking about the process of dying was unconventional. My first reaction was, “More people need to hear this.”
That’s the easy piece for me–getting an idea heard. It’s even easy for me to envision using that idea to attract like-minded people. Wisdom (and the questions that it points to) are part of what draws individuals into a community.
What’s hard for me is what happens next, once others start participating. It’s the wild and wooly part of this work. A metaphor works best to explain further.
Think of the wisdom as a cake in the display window of a bakery. It’s not an ordinary cake but one that is special–with exquisite decoration and appealing color and shape. This cake attracts the attention of certain people passing by on the sidewalk–someone who likes three layer cakes with glazed strawberries on the top. These individuals stop, they look further, and decide to enter the bakery. And when they get into the bakery, they get all kinds of ideas of what’s possible, from looking at the tarts, pies, cookies, muffins, brownies, breads, and other assorted pastries. Instead of buying the chocolate cake in the window, they ask for something different, a blackberry peach cobbler, that is nowhere to be seen in the bakery, that somehow was inspired by the cake with strawberries. It’s a special order.
That’s what it’s like with a community. Start here and make it work for you. Come into the conversation–enter the bakery–and be inspired. And if what emerges is blackberry peach cobbler, hooray! We expect nothing less than a riff off of what we currently know and embrace. If you decide that what you really wanted was to use the bakery’s bathroom or get a cup of coffee, hooray! We’re glad you came in and said a kind word, nodded in our direction, made human contact. And our best customers will be those who request blackberry peach cobbler and then help us figure out how to make it.
In the book, Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirkey (a must read for ABV enthusiasists), the author talks about Wikipedia and how 80% of an entry is written by a handful of people. The rest is written by lots and lots more people who make just one change. And you know what? You need all of them to get to a well-written entry. Not just the handful of core contributors. You need everyone, even the guy who notices that an apostrophe is used incorrectly for indicating plural instead of possessive.
This is part of the ABV journey, embracing whatever shows up and not only being willing to have your ideas shaped by others, but expecting it to happen. Come into the bakery. Join the conversation.
Eating Our Own Dog Food: Lessons from the ABV Pilot
As the ABV pilot is winding down with our three clients, the ABV team is turning towards the question of “What’s next?”
Part of the answer lies in treating ABV as the fourth client.
What does this mean? I’m the client and the ABV team is taking me through the paces of exploring my story and related wisdom, of figuring out how to attract and build an ABV community of kindred spirits using networking, marketing, and technology. And quite frankly, always in the background for me is how to monetize after the community is formed. I don’t think I could call myself an entrepreneur if I wasn’t thinking about the monetization piece, even if it’s not something I will be acting on immediately.
There’s a nice creative tension between myself and Beth, the ABV consultant on community-building. Beth reminds me that the focus is on building the community first and that I should expect the wild ride that comes with a community. Beth has a long history in the non-profit world. She understands deep in her bones the unpredictable and glorious outcomes that come from a community. She knows that the more you try to control a community, the farther off you veer from digging where the real gold is. She keeps me honest.
Back to ABV as the fourth client. I’m almost finished with the Full Expression work. One of my pieces of wisdom, something I believe but that I could never “prove” like I would a theorem in math is this:
“Wisdom comes from unexpected places, and it can change the world.”
It’s why I have a visceral reaction when I run into an innovator who has remarkable ideas, stuff that makes me marvel and wonder who else could benefit from hearing those ideas. This was the driving force in taping interviews with my friend, Ilene Kouzel, as she was dying of ALS (aka Lou Gehrig’s disease). I knew that the way Ilene was talking and thinking about the process of dying was unconventional. My first reaction was, “More people need to hear this.”
That’s the easy piece for me–getting an idea heard. It’s even easy for me to envision using that idea to attract like-minded people. Wisdom (and the questions that it points to) are part of what draws individuals into a community.
What’s hard for me is what happens next, once others start participating. It’s the wild and wooly part of this work. A metaphor works best to explain further.
Think of the wisdom as a cake in the display window of a bakery. It’s not an ordinary cake but one that is special–with exquisite decoration and appealing color and shape. This cake attracts the attention of certain people passing by on the sidewalk–someone who likes three layer cakes with glazed strawberries on the top. These individuals stop, they look further, and decide to enter the bakery. And when they get into the bakery, they get all kinds of ideas of what’s possible, from looking at the tarts, pies, cookies, muffins, brownies, breads, and other assorted pastries. Instead of buying the chocolate cake in the window, they ask for something different, a blackberry peach cobbler, that is nowhere to be seen in the bakery, that somehow was inspired by the cake with strawberries. It’s a special order.
That’s what it’s like with a community. Start here and make it work for you. Come into the conversation–enter the bakery–and be inspired. And if what emerges is blackberry peach cobbler, hooray! We expect nothing less than a riff off of what we currently know and embrace. If you decide that what you really wanted was to use the bakery’s bathroom or get a cup of coffee, hooray! We’re glad you came in and said a kind word, nodded in our direction, made human contact. And our best customers will be those who request blackberry peach cobbler and then help us figure out how to make it.
In the book, Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirkey (a must read for ABV enthusiasists), the author talks about Wikipedia and how 80% of an entry is written by a handful of people. The rest is written by lots and lots more people who make just one change. And you know what? You need all of them to get to a well-written entry. Not just the handful of core contributors. You need everyone, even the guy who notices that an apostrophe is used incorrectly for indicating plural instead of possessive.
This is part of the ABV journey, embracing whatever shows up and not only being willing to have your ideas shaped by others, but expecting it to happen. Come into the bakery. Join the conversation.