Using Transient Communities in your Business
The Classical Company approach
Classically we give jobs to people, they have job titles that tell us what they do, we segment marketing by verticals and we build fiefdoms with firewalls to separate sales, product management, development, our partners and our customers!!!
When something bad happens we create a "task force" or a "war room" and we set a leader and we define that people will participate. We set some metric in place thinking that if we meet that target then we have been successful.
The effect of this is that the members of the task force generally do not commit fully to get the job done because there are being forced to work for someone else. The target will always be met because the group has to be seen to succeed but in the end the real business benefit is hard to identify.
The Click Company approach
In a Click Company we need to utilize communities that form when people have common interest.
The community (or call it a team if you are more comfortable with that) should include everyone thats interested including our partners and our customers when it makes sense. The community will form, work together and will stay together as long as the interest remains. When it feels the goal has been reached or no further progress can be made then the activity will naturally decline.
Some of these communities may become permanent such as communities where competitive knowledge is built or they could be transient such as when a team forms to deal with a customer issue or to launch a new product. In any case you will see spikes in activity that occur around specific topics such as a competitor acquisition. The news will break, there will be some discussion, and then the activity fades. It's natural and you don't need to try to manage it, the value is in the moment of the conversation and in the interaction, the only thing you need to do is allow it to happen and make it available to everyone.
