Communities, Leadership & Building

Something has been bothering me this whole time since I last posted here. The tragedy of COVID-19 has amplified this worrying thought in my head. I want to take this time and talk about what is bothering me. It is going to be long, somewhat scrappy but hopefully sound and worth your time.

Here it comes: I worry that our country is going backwards. Okay, that was not too long... Of course that is not what is bothering me. What bothers me are the reasons for this backsliding. I have tried to figure out why we are going backwards for many years. I have had all the pieces in my head for a while. It is only recently that it all came together.

We don't build. If you stopped reading at this point I hope that is what you take away from this. As a country, as a people, as a community, we have stopped building. Have you even noticed this?

Building

By definition, to build is to construct something by putting parts or material together. If I could, I would change this definition. I would add that it is only building when you do it to solve a problem. Otherwise it is just waste.

There is a lot of building going on around the country, so what am I droning on about? We don't build things that matter anymore. We don't build to solve problems. All of our building is replacing old things that have been around for a while. Fixing broken things. Or simply building for the sake of it, or as I like to call it, building without context.

Context for building is very simple. It is a need or a problem that needs solving.

Building to replace old things or fixing broken things is good. However, it is not good when it is the only kind of building happening. A lot of people see this type of building as progress. To me, it is just change. It is not progress.

It is really difficult to understand the amount of wasted building happening around us. This difficulty is partly due to the difference of opinion on what matters. What matters to you may not matter to me, and vice versa. However, when discussed within a certain context these differences fall away. For example, without any given background context, Eskom^[1] is very important to our progress as a nation and is currently very useful. But given where we have been and where we want to be, Eskom and its general direction is a huge waste. We are seeing widespread countrywide power outages because Eskom is still launching new coal powered generation stations. Although countless studies have indicated that this is not a good direction to go, for environmental reasons and also for cost reasons. Affordable coal is not an infinite resource.

It is also partly due to the difficulty of understanding what matters. For example, building houses for people under the RDP (Reconstruction and Development Programme) is not something that matters anymore. That sounds wrong and harsh, if you don't understand why it doesn't matter anymore. What matters are the fine details of how fast, efficient and effective this building is happening today, how much innovation has happened since the programme launched. We cannot be in the same position as we were in 1994, when the programme launched, and think we are making progress.

This is not a piece to criticise the South African government. It just happens that they provide a lot of large scale waste examples.

There are many private businesses that are launched and subsequently folded within a year. This is not a bad thing in and of itself. Trying to launch businesses is good. What is bad is doing it for the sake of being in business. Businesses that exist without a need or problem they are solving tend to either stagnate or die. I am sure you know of such businesses, I won't shame by naming here. This even happens at a product scale within successful businesses. Products are launched without clear context and they don't see the expected success. Sometimes these products aren't scraped. They are kept around because people don't want to admit failure. I wanted to make some examples here but I think it could be bad manners to call something a failure before the owner realises it.

Seeing as a lot of wasted building happens because of the lack of context. How do we provide this context? Where do all the successful building projects get their context? I think that communities are the source of this context.

Communities

A community is a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common. The part about having a particular characteristic in common is most important to me.

There is currently a car orbiting our sun; we as humans put it there. We have made flying around in aeroplanes so routine we cannot imagine what it was like before they existed. Modern medicine is incredible; we swap each other's organs with relative ease. However, to me, the internet is still the most amazing thing we have built as humans.

I love the internet. The internet made the first part of the definition of a community obsolete. You know, the part about living in the same place? We don't have to live in the same place to be a community anymore. I am part of many communities, with people I have never met or even been in a 100km radius around. Whether you realise it or not; if you use the internet, you are probably part of some community too. The internet didn't make this possible of course, it just made it easier and efficient. For all practical purposes, it was challenging; impossible, the internet made it possible.

Working in software development, I have noticed that the existence of communities as per the second part of the definition; having a particular characteristic in common; is what determines the success of developed products. These communities are known by different names depending on who is addressing them. For doctors they are called patients, for businesses they are called markets or market segments, for governments, interestingly, they are just communities. Communities provide problems to solve to the builder. Communities use the solutions that the builder makes. We therefore cannot build successfully without the right communities.

We don't use the internet as well as other countries do. We don't form communities. We don't form forums. We don't use the internet to find those who are like us, who have the same problems we have, who have the same struggles as us. We don't use the internet to start discussions on our social problems and how we can solve them. We only use the internet to consume media and products that have been built by others who are in a totally different context than us. Obviously this may not apply to you specifically. I am talking about the general public in our country. WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook are where we spend most of our time on the internet. Yes, these are social networks but there is nothing socially about us going on in these platforms. The largest and most prominent discussions are about Kim and Kanye's marriage. They are about what dress Rihanna wore to the Met Gala. None of these discussions provide context for us to build.

I recently had a discussion with my friends about how SARS^[2] has mastered the digitisation of tax filing. It is impressive to me. Both because it is a difficult feat on its own and also because they have done it within our incompetent government. When thinking about it after this discussion, it occurred to me that SARS is successful because there is a somewhat large community of tax payers and our government finds that community important. This community has provided the context for SARS to be successful. Tax payers don't want to stand in long queues all day, so SARS had to beef up its online tools. Other communities that exist within our country are not very visible or useful to our government and therefore are very difficult to build for and neglected. People spend full days in a queue at Department of Labour offices to do things that can be easily done online in a few minutes.

I have read many stories of independent developers (Indie Hackers) who have started profitable businesses servicing small communities that they started online. Some of these stories sound super crazy and unbelievable. An example is the founding of Ghost, an online publishing platform. John O’Nolan started a business that was making $750 000 per year in 2017 from a blog post. Jason Grishkoff has had an interesting journey swinging between success, loss and success with Indie Shuffle, which was initially just a blog. There are more stories like this all over the internet.

I am truly convinced that successful building can only be achieved within the context of the right community.

Show me any successful business and I will show you the right community that existed and made it successful. Here are more examples, GradConnection had the community of unemployed grads around the world. Black Like Me (in its hey day; I am not sure if it is still as successful these days) had the underserved community of black women in hair care products. There are many others.

If you are in a business and cannot clearly identify the community you are serving in a single simple sentence, oops!

So then knowing that the right communities are precursors to successful building, how do we start more useful communities? How do we form visible communities that reveal our problems and make them visible to builders? Leadership is my answer to this.

Leadership

When you mention leadership people immediately think of some office worker of sorts, government employees or worse, politicians. This is sad. Leadership is nothing like that. I don't know if I can define leadership in general in a way that sounds good. Instead I will discuss leadership for the purpose of creating communities for successful building.

We lack the experience and drive to start communities and make them visible and accessible to builders. It might be because of the fear of rejection and failure. I have had ideas to form communities and never started because I worried people would not join the communities which would amount to both rejection and failure.

The few striving online communities we have are all technical and full of technical people, they are scary and hostile to non-technical people. They are kept exclusive and can be full of people who mislead each other into building what they think is cool and not what the general population needs.

Starting an online community is not an easy task. I  have not done enough of it to have any wise advice. Online communities can be a lot of work to start, and even more work as they grow. They can be toxic and they can demand a lot of attention. Doing hard things that need to be done is leadership. Doing things because they lead to progress for many is leadership. Not just to line your own pockets (refer all ANC^[3] members here, please).

Leadership for this purpose does not mean doing all the hard things yourself. It can be setting up for others to help, setting up for others to contribute content or participating in keeping the toxicity out of the communities. It can be identifying the communities that need to be started and encouraging others to start them. It can be funding others' efforts to start these communities. It is doing anything that leads to the sustainability of any right community that provides a context for successful building.

Now that it is clear that leadership is how it all starts, what can we do about this?

Well

The onus is on you to go out there and start or join communities. Find people who share your social context. Find other people who share the same struggles and pains as you. You have a child with asthma? Find other parents of children with asthma. You will learn something from them and you can teach them something. You have a small and growing business? Find other small business owners. You will get tips and ideas on how to grow your business. You will help another business owner save their business. Build these communities, grow them, make them visible. Keep them clean, inclusive and friendly for others to join.

Really, I think it is that simple. Just start. Everything else comes from this beginning. People learn from each other. Problems that need solving emerge. Builders get context. We build and go forward as a nation.

Echo

Coming up with a closing section for this post has been really hard. It has taken me days and required me to think a lot. I think what is challenging is knowing what I want to do with this information.

Someone who read an early draft of this post suggested that I provide more examples, for both waste and good building. Another suggested that I give directional examples of what needs to be done. I argued against both, suggesting that I do not want this post to be instructional. That is true. But also, I am not sure I would have an instructional and executable example of what needs to be done.

Instead, what I will do is take action. I am going to challenge myself and I am going to lead. I am going to start and join communities. I am going to build. I am going to push myself to document this journey in follow-up posts. I hope that someone else will learn from my journey and be inspired to start their own or join someone else on theirs.

If you enjoyed reading this and would like to read more on the journey I am taking, subscribe below and keep an eye on your inbox. Share this post with friends, colleagues, leaders and builders in your circle.

I would like to hear your thoughts, criticisms and ideas. Reach out to me on my email blog.thoughtecho at gmail or on Twitter

Ciao for now!

[1]: Eskom is a South African electricity public utility
[2]: The South African Revenue Service is the revenue service of the South African government
[3]: The African National Congress is the Republic of South Africa's governing political party