Building a Meta Community: 6 Years on
I started a meta-community in early 2020, just before we all stayed at our desks. The goal, as I wrote at the time, was to build a rehearsal room for thinking – a space where people could show up as a process, not a product. Six years later, I am more convinced than ever that this is the work. Not because the original intuition was right, but because everything that has happened since–AI, isolation, the flattening of professional identity–has made the need sharper and more urgent.
The original provocation was simple. When we join a community, the whole apparatus is a shelving system for productized thinking. A design community invites designers to discuss designer-y things. A leadership community invites leaders to perform leadership. The community is a product offered to certain personas, and how those personas engage is designed and prescribed. I used to visualize the difference as exchanging vegetables at a market versus tending to the soil together. Most communities are in the vegetable exchange business. The interesting work happens in the soil.
What I was after with Thirdness–and what I am still after–is a different kind of space. One where you can belong without fitting in.
From Plan to Container
The conventional community has a plan. It prescribes the direction and sequence of its moving parts. Members know what to expect because the format tells them. This is efficient. It is also deadening to the kind of creativity that matters most – the creativity that does not yet have language, that lives in the margins of your professional life, that no one is asking for yet.
I call this creative surplus. It is the thinking, energy, and intuition left over after you have attended to your duties. Without care and attention, it dissipates as background noise or curdles into professional resentment. Most spaces do not know what to do with it, because creative surplus does not fit the agenda. It is not a deliverable. It is not on the roadmap. It is the thing you think about in the shower and forget by the time you sit down at your desk.
Containers are an alternative to plans. Where a plan prescribes, a container holds. It creates conditions rather than directions. The air between the people, the energy in the room, the confusion that precedes both inspiration and value. From several years of running Thirdness and developing Critical Business School, it is clear that when people are asked to fit, they limit what they say and how creative they allow themselves to be around others. When they are held instead of directed, something else becomes possible.
Circles, Not Communities
I have written before about the difference between communities and circles. A community is a room with the facilitator at the front, funneling value like a breakfast lecture. A circle is a bonfire. The conversation happens in the middle, and the facilitator positions herself around it. The value is generated from within. A community is a choir. A circle is band practice for solo artists.
This is not a semantic distinction. It changes everything about how people show up. Communities are designed for a persona, which means there is an implicit agreement about who you are supposed to be and what you are supposed to get out of it. Members perform. They follow the etiquette. They fit in. Circles are built for the person, in all of their complexity and contradiction. You do not need to resolve yourself into a coherent professional identity before you walk in.