Over the course of my career, I've been part of multiple initiatives to start internal communities at work. Some of them became something genuinely special — people showing up, contributing, looking forward to the next gathering. Others quietly died after a few months, victims of low attendance and dwindling energy.
For a long time I couldn't figure out what separated the successes from the failures. Was it the topic? The timing? The right people involved? I kept searching for the formula.
Then I listened to an episode of the ReThinking podcast last week where Adam Grant sat down with Dan Coyle — author of The Culture Code and his new book Flourish — and one thing Coyle said stopped me in my tracks.
Community, he pointed out, literally means shared gifts. And shared gifts aren't something you passively receive. They're something you participate in.
We've been thinking about it the wrong way
Maybe you’ve tried to build an internal community before. You scheduled kickoffs, crafted mission statements, send out invites, and waited for people to come. There's a meeting. Maybe a few more meetings. And then slowly, painfully, the whole thing fizzles.
What's missing isn't better planning. It's action.
Coyle makes a sharp distinction between complicated problems and complex ones. Complicated things — like building a car — can be solved with a detailed enough instruction manual. Complex things, like raising a teenager or growing a living community, respond differently every time you engage with them. You can't plan your way through them. You have to try things, see what happens, and adjust.
Internal communities are deeply complex. And yet we keep treating them like they're complicated.
Awakening, not building
Coyle reframes the concept: we don't build community. We awaken it.
It was already there. The desire to connect, to contribute, to belong — that's not something you manufacture. It's dormant, waiting for the right conditions. What those conditions require isn't a perfect structure. They require someone willing to say: here's the table, here's the invitation, come on Tuesday at noon.
He tells the story of Patrick Bernard, a shy, introverted journalist in Paris who, after retiring, decided to run a social experiment. He rented 80 long tables, set them up in the middle of the street, and invited his neighborhood to the longest dinner table in Paris. No grand strategy. No sponsorship deck. Just an action. What emerged from that single, slightly absurd act was a self-organizing network of book clubs, bike repair groups, memory circles, and mutual aid that transformed a previously snobbish neighborhood into something resembling a village.
Nobody planned that outcome. Nobody could have.
The pattern
Reflecting on my own experiences, the communities that worked all had one thing in common: something happened early. Not a vision document. An event. A small, slightly messy thing that gave people a chance to show up, contribute something, and leave feeling like they were part of something real.
The communities that failed? They were over-prepared and under-activated. We spent so long getting the setup right that by the time we launched, the energy was already gone. We built the stage but forgot to start the show.
Coyle calls this a bias for action. The worst advice about building community, he says, is "think it through." Communities don't spring from careful planning. They spring from experiments. From trying something, noticing what happens, and doing more of that.
Letting go
The counterintuitive insight Coyle returns to is that the best thing a community leader can do is let go. Not step back entirely, but stop trying to control every outcome. The leaders who kill communities are the ones who can't tolerate the mess — the uncertainty, the self-organization, the surprise.
Four words Coyle hears over and over in flourishing communities:
It's up to you.
Those words aren't abdication. They're an act of trust. They create the conditions for ownership, belonging, and genuine contribution. They're the difference between community as a program someone runs and community as something people genuinely inhabit.
And maybe this is not only through for building great communities but also great organizations.
The takeaway
Don't wait until everything is ready — it never will be. Pick a date, invite people, and do something together before you've figured it all out. Give people enough structure to show up, and enough freedom to surprise you. Then tolerate the mess that follows, because that mess isn't a sign something is going wrong. It's the community forming.
Go set up the table. See who shows up.
More information
The keys to a flourishing community with Dan Coyle - ReThinking | Podcast on Spotify
The keys to a flourishing community with Dan Coyle (Transcript)