Why Idea Friendly is happening now
In 2016, my cofounder Deb Brown and I were on a working retreat when the Idea Friendly Method was still fairly new. As we worked through the method, she asked, “Why is this happening now?” Which is a great question.
I gave her a long answer at the time, and I’ve previously shared part of it in one article here and in our member videos.
Today, I’m sharing the full story with you. It’s everything to do with our ability to communicate across distance.
- In the 1840s, we got the telegraph to deliver messages in minutes, not weeks.
- In the 1850s, postage stamps made sending mail easy, no trip to the post office required.
- In the 1860s, the typewriter let us make consistent documents and duplicates more quickly.
You can imagine how together these made communication a lot easier, and that easier communication revolutionized how people worked together.
- In the 1850s, we saw the first uses of organizational charts to manage businesses.
- In the 1870s, we got Robert’s Rules of Order for organizations to make decisions together.
This was setting up the style of formal organizations that we still work with today. It’s part of all our local organizations, governments, boards and committees.
This is also why so many organizations have founding dates in the 1900s and ‘10s. It was an organization boom. Professional societies, fraternities and sororities, arts organizations, unions, commercial groups and a lot more multiplied and thrived for decades.
But communications tools kept changing.
- In the 1970s, we saw the beginnings of email.
- In the 1980s, it was the internet.
- In the 1990s, text messaging.
- By the 2000s, we had social networks.
Then it all moved into our hands, and we carried it everywhere. By today, it’s clear:
Our old way of organizing ourselves in the typewriter age won’t cut it anymore.
You are reading this on a device with more computing power than all government agencies held, what, 50 years ago? Together, people like you and me hold more communications power, the ability to reach individuals and groups, to broadcast and to receive, instantly, synchronously or asynchronously, than all the media companies held decades ago.
We have instant access to information that was unthinkable even 20 years ago. And we can access it any time and anywhere. Common AI tools can now help us understand and tap that information.
Knowing all that, it’s obvious that these new communications tools mean we’re going to use new ways of working together. That’s why we are shifting from formal organizations to working together informally, as needed. It’s an epic shift in power toward individuals. It’s another boom, but without all the structure.
Formal organizations were a solution to a different era of communication scarcity.
The Idea Friendly Method is a response to communication abundance.
We’ve tried making do with stopgaps like holding better engagement sessions, putting all the ideas on the wall and voting with dots, and letting people pitch ideas. It’s still the old way, and it’s still costing us precious energy.
Every Decision Costs Rural Communities Energy: The Old Way drains capacity, the Idea Friendly Way builds capacity
That Old Way is formal, with structure, committees, meetings, notes, reports, and accountability. A few people do most of the organizing with appointments, officers and official members.
Its main function is to decide. Pick winners, eliminate choices, streamline, hold votes, find the one “best” way and write the plans.
It’s a Decision Machine.
Because of the effort of mobilizing and deciding, the Old Way tends to approve large projects that are long term. It’s just not worth it to put in all the effort and make all the decisions for little things.
When someone brings up a new idea to an Old Way organization, that triggers a cascade of decisions:
- Is this a good idea?
- Who should evaluate it?
- Should we form a committee?
- What are the risks?
- Do we have the resources?
- Should we get an outside expert?
- Whose permission do we need?
- What rules does this trigger?
- What does the committee recommend?
- Do we need public input?
- Should we vote?
We get these layers of decisions by decades of good people saying, if we add one more rule, then we’re less likely to fail.
Every single one of those decisions drains energy. My friend Rob Hatch says “Decisions are distractions.” Stopping what we are doing to debate “whether” or “how” or “why” burns part of our limited attention.
All that debate, research and thinking costs energy, and it drains the capacity of rural communities.
The person with the idea loses momentum. The community loses the potential contribution. And nothing was even tried.
Rob’s answer to decisions is to Decide Ahead of Time. Strip the thing down to the simplest decision you can make before you’re in the situation. You make this one decision that eliminates hundreds of future decisions and saves your capacity for important work.
In the Idea Friendly Method, the simplest decision to make ahead of time is “All ideas are good enough to let someone test.”
The question shifts from:
“Should we do this?” (and all the questions that come from that)
to
“What’s the smallest version someone could try?” (and you don’t even need a sticky dot vote)
The first evaluation can happen after the tiny test, when there’s actual evidence. Not before, when all we have to go on is our past experience, speculation and opinion.
Maybe, the formal organization doesn’t need to get involved at all. Maybe regular people make the whole thing work without going back to formality.
In the old way, community energy is spent running the Decision Machine over and over, deciding whether to act.
In the Idea Friendly way, energy is spent trying something small and seeing what you can learn, or just enjoying the thing you did.
In the old way, It takes the same large amount of energy for a small idea as a big one.
In the Idea Friendly way, it takes the same small amount of energy to try a small idea or try a small step to test a big idea.
A great example of cutting down the energy spent before trying anything comes from a small town in Missouri.
The Idea Friendly Method puts success in your community’s way
Bob Hughes in Hamilton, Missouri, sends me regular updates of the Hamilton Community Alliance. I had been thinking of it as just a nice idea, and then we exchanged a few emails that changed my thinking.
They hold quarterly meetings where people from different organizations and groups share what they’re up to, and they create new projects together. The conversations and connections help people find the resources and guidance that will make them more successful. The conversations are the key.
Bob said, “Probably the best thing is that people are starting to see the interconnectivity of what we are doing. Your model of providing people with the guidance and resources to make their ideas a reality is spot on!!!”
Notice the Idea Friendly part: helping people with their ideas. Not voting and trying to get everyone to back a single grand vision. Not requiring buy-in to one big plan. Supporting whatever ideas people bring, at least to test them.
The HCA’s mission includes: “resource, connect and empower persons, organizations, and agencies to partner together for the betterment of Hamilton MO and Caldwell County.”
That’s how the Idea Friendly Method becomes a community-wide movement.
You put success in your community’s way
The Idea Friendly Method gives you a path: Gather Your Crowd around an idea, Build Connections to turn that crowd into a network, Take Small Steps to make it happen together.
But how do you do this as a whole community? That’s where I’m borrowing Rob Hatch’s “Put Success in Your Way” framework. It’s a simple approach of making the thing you want to do easier than not doing it.
Rob often shares this example: if you want to make sure you go run in the morning, put your running shoes by the bed the night before. (Obviously, there’s a lot more to it, but let’s just borrow this part.)
For communities, this means creating the places and times that make it easy for people to connect and act. The Hamilton Community Alliance is intentionally putting success in people’s way by creating the regular gathering space where connections happen automatically.
More examples of putting success in your community’s way
In Caldwell, Kansas, the local do-ers used to gather for Mule Mondays. They went for Moscow Mules on Monday nights at a local spot where they’d talk about what they wanted for their community. Informal. Regular. Easy to show up.
In Ponca City, Oklahoma, Alena Jennings is part of a text message group chat for local business owners. They share books they are reading, ideas they have and requests for info. One person might ask something like, “Does anyone know a musician available for this weekend? I have a last-minute event!”
Resources can surface easily because the connections already exist.
How NOT to put success in your community’s way
Compare that to formal monthly meetings in another place I visited. They are run by an outside organization with strict agendas, and held in a courthouse conference room. (The court house is never the most friendly place to get together.)
One person was treated as “in charge” and others were expected to show proper deference.
“Well, it’s her meeting, so we’ll have to ask her if you can share that. It’s not on the agenda.”
People have to stay after if they want to informally talk to each other. Fewer ideas get traction because there’s little room for organic collaboration.
From individual action to community movement
When you put success in people’s way, you get what Bob described. People seeing the connections. Resources appearing when someone needs them. Ideas becoming reality because the system supports them instead of blocking them.
That’s how the Idea Friendly Method scales from one person with an idea to an entire community making things happen.
Create the regular gathering space.
Keep it informal enough that real conversation happens.
Connect people to people.
The Idea Friendly Way is measurably better than the Old Way Decision Machine
Let’s look at the rather clunky Decision Machines again. The Idea Friendly Method is measurably better for small towns.
The world is changing around all of us, and Iowa State University has been studying what characteristics help communities facing change. They followed 99 small towns for over 20 years.
Communities that are “tolerant of different opinions and allow newcomers to be involved in decision-making and power structures – those tend to have better economic and demographic outcomes,” David J. Peters said.
And that is regardless of what changes the community lived through.
The study is called the Iowa Small Towns Project. Their fact sheet on this “open leadership” is called “Why Leadership Matters for Rural Community Vitality in Iowa” and is available for free. There’s a lot of the Idea Friendly Method in there, just not by name.
The Old Way of working, the Decision Machine, is obsolete technology. It was designed for a world where communication was relatively slow and expensive, so you had to centralize decisions, formalize structures, and move cautiously because coordinating took a large share of your effort.
The Idea Friendly Method is how we can align how we work together with the communications tools we all use every day. There are three parts to making your rural community more Idea Friendly.
You Gather Your Crowd with a big idea. You start a public discussion about the kind of town you want to live in. You create the public focal point for the kind of positive conversations you want to start.
You turn the crowd into a capable network through Building Connections. Connect your people to each other so they become more than just a crowd, they become a network. In order to make your people even more capable, you connect them with resources and training.
You and the crowd accomplish the idea through Taking Small Steps. You make it possible for more people to be involved. Small steps cut down the scale of the idea from huge and scary to small and doable. You also make it easier to fail (and learn) at a small scale rather than crash and burn with a huge effort all at once.
The Old Way is no longer mandatory. It is never going back to the way it used to be. We start from here and move forward.
Most all the best things you can do to move forward don’t require anyone’s permission. You don’t have to wait any longer.
