Hard solder first: what silversmithing taught me about scaling communities

The stronger the ties within your core, the larger it can ripple into wider circles and scale: why strengthening your closest relationships is fundamental to expand and build new tight bonds as your community grows.

Soldering is a key step in silversmithing. A single piece of jewelry may contains multiple points of solder (joints) - which are brought together by heat. Specifically, by fire. As seen in this International Gem Society article, "Solder is the small piece of alloyed metal that you melt in order to fuse two other pieces of metal."

"Solders come in three types: hard, medium, and easy. Each type has a different melting point. Hard melts at high temperature, medium at a lower temperature, and easy at an even lower temperature."

If you're wearing a simple ring right now, you might not be able to notice it, but it contains at least one joint to bring both ends of a single metal thread together. If your rings has another piece attached to it (like a gem), it's possible it contains over two joints.

As well explained in the same article: "You don’t want to re-melt a joint you’ve just soldered while soldering another joint in the same jewelry piece.Using solders with different melting points will keep you from re-flowing previously completed joints. For example, you’ll use hard solder on the first joint, medium on the second joint, and easy on the third joint."

I bet you know where I'm going with this, already.

Community building implies a lot of chemistry metaphors. If you read my first book (Hacking Communities), you read me saying that engineering serendipitous encounters that build long-lasting relationships is like collision theory applied to humans (rate of successful reactions is proportional to the number of collisions between reactant molecules). This time, I want to talk about what happens after a serendipitous encounter occurs.

Building Collective Relationships: Closeness Circles

Source: Hacking Communities, 2020 (page 222-231).

"The closer you get to someone, the deeper your conversation becomes. The concentric circles framework illustrates a communication system with different levels of interaction. The layers define the cadence (frequency) and depth (intimacy) of communication between you and other people within your community. (...)

Having layers of communication is natural to humans. Our relationships grow from interactions, creating familiarity and trust. In a nutshell, we can say the variable for closeness is vulnerability.

While you are likely to grow closer to people who have been in your community for a longer period of time, there are different variables that matter to building closeness. The frequency of encounters between people, as well as their level of engagement with others within your community, highly influences how close they get to your core, over time.?

One of the most common ways of moving deeper into the core of the Closeness Circles is through wholehearted (genuine) contribution. Regardless of how long a person has been in your community, some people become intimate at a faster pace by adding value first. People who are intrinsically aligned with the idea of “giving before taking” (abundance), who comprehend that “we rise by lifting others” (humility), and act accordingly to these ideas with sincerity, from their hearts (authenticity). In doing so, they naturally act in accordance with the community’s core values (abundance, humility, authenticity), and might grow closer to its core, faster.

I chose three levels as a minimum because it helps build and keep balance within a community. When there are only two levels, you can create an inside/outside dynamic with some people boasting or trying to attain power that they do not own, while others may feel excluded, compromising the sense of trust and safety that is fundamental for the community to simply exist. At three levels you lessen the risk of polarity—from there, you can grow into more layers outwards, depending on the complexity of your community.

The ones closest to the core not only get insider benefits or privileged information, but also more responsibilities. They are required to act towards the common good and represent the community, making sure their actions and words reflect its core. They are committed to giving.

The core of a community belongs to those who have expressed its core values the most.

Source: Hacking Communities, 2020 (page 222-231).

The Art of Soldering Applied to Community Building (3 steps):

???? Design First

Plan ahead when designing the piece of jewelry, as when designing the types of relationships and interactions within your community. When designing a piece, you don't want to start from the most outward-looking part, and end up melting it all apart.

???????? Start from Your Strongest Bonds

By having a rough understanding of what your piece of jewelry (aka community) will look like in the end, you'll know which steps and relationships are crucial for it to endure the heat and pressure when it comes the need to incorporate new pieces into it.

?? Hard Solder First, Easy Solder Last

Having a solid base brought together by hard solder enables a piece to evolve in complexity, as strong relationships help communities scale without compromising its integrity.

In a Nutshell: More Nurturing, Less Outreach

The attractiveness of a community is built by its people, not by constant advertising. It is built by relationships, not transactions.

Following that logic, to build strong, enduring communities that thrive through time and pressure, you must learn the art of engineering strong relationships from inside out, that won't melt as you add on new relationships. As you grow, having build a solid relationship at the core of your community will allow it to endure and thrive through pressure, as jewelery endures and becomes itself through heat.

Many companies are eager for the "next-shiny-object", as many people are hungry to find the "next-most-interesting-person-in-the-club". Both of which often take for granted the relationships that already exist, that serve as the foundation to the community.

The stronger the relationships within, the more it will appeal to outsiders as a safe, cool place they might as well belong to.

Communities follow the formula:

Identity + Connectedness = Growth.

Where Identity means people are glad to represent, and to be represented by your community, and Connectedness means that these relationships flow in a decentralized way.

People feel it's their own, and their responsibility to lead more people into the community.

Communities grow through the very relationships that sustain them.

Your thoughts? :)

PS: if you’re also a passionate nerd around community stuff, check out our fresh?upcoming cohort?at the On Deck Community Builders Fellowship (kickoff Feb ‘22)

originally posted on my Substack