Stories are the most powerful way we humans learn. Every community, like every person, is full of stories. Sharing certain stories deepens a community’s connections. If people don’t know (or can’t learn) your stories, they don’t know or understand your community. They can’t know who you are, what you do, or how what you do matters. Stories are how members, future members, and outsiders learn the values and the value of the community. The stories must be shared so that members can understand the community’s authentic values and identity.
Anyone familiar with a religious tradition knows at least a few iconic stories that are core to the tradition’s identity. Canonical and sacred texts including the Muslim Qur’an, Christian Bible, Jewish Torah, and Buddhist sutras are full of stories. Some are historical and others metaphoric.
In all great religions, there are stories that must be known if one is to understand the tradition, such as the Buddha’s enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree, the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, and the Mormon story of Joseph Smith’s revelation by angels and golden tablets.
Among the most important stories are origin stories. By definition, these stories explain how something started, i.e., its origin. There can be different origin stories for different parts of a community. But there must be a single origin story about how the founders were inspired to form the community. The story must include how they learned something new, did something new, and then invited others to join them.
Ideally, community origin stories are true—but what “true” means can vary. There are many ways to tell any story by selecting what’s shared and what’s left out. Origin stories are often considered true if they share factual, emotional, or ideological truth. They are strongest if all three are represented.
Community origin stories communicate who the community serves, why it serves, and often how it serves. More important, stories also share values. Stories do this far more effectively than a mission or values statement ever can. As communities change over time, the origin story will expand or new origin stories will emerge to explain how the current community differs from earlier versions. The new stories will all share how the community faced new challenges and responded accordingly.
For example, thirteen years ago, the Lowell Mothers Community (not its real name) started when twelve new mothers met in a breastfeeding group hosted in a local church. They were excited to meet and created supportive relationships outside the original group. Out of convenience, they set up an online community to support one another with babysitting, carpooling, sharing nannies, and good mothering advice. Other mothers joined the online community, and the larger membership brought more resources to serve one another. Now, over ten years later, thousands of mothers connect, seek help, and support one another, including many who live far beyond Lowell.
There must also be stories about how the community’s values are expressed and how they affect real people. These stories will tell everyone far more about the community identity than everything else combined. When you think of communities you appreciate, consider what stories are told to newcomers and shared over and over again among members. These stories represent the values all hope to embody.
Katie works for New Belgium Brewing. Founded in Fort Collins, Colorado, in 1991, this beer brewing company prides itself on a collaborative culture, making employees owners and keeping the company financials open for all employees to see. Katie shared with me a story that’s really important for her about her company.
Early on, its leadership wanted to find a way to use low- or zero-carbon emission energy to power its operations instead of coal-sourced electricity. There was an opportunity to do this, but it required the company to sign a contract for ten years of wind power and pay a significant cash advance. As the story goes, the company had the money in hand but had already promised it as year-end bonuses for the employees. A meeting was called, and the company founders explained the situation, then left the room. After an hour of discussion, all the employees agreed to skip their bonuses so that the company could run on wind energy. The story tells Katie that she works in a community that will make hard choices and take actions consistent with the company’s environmentalist values. Its leaders would even incur costs to maintain the integrity between what they say they value and what they do.
As Brené Brown now famously discusses in her book Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, vulnerability is when we share something we fear may cause others to reject us. This includes uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.1 Strong communities share stories in which leadership, members, or even the overall organization was vulnerable. These stories build strong bonds. They may include accounts of failure, or the fears, feelings, and truths we don’t want the whole world to know. These stories are so important that if they’re not shared, and the vulnerability and intimacy is never built, there will almost certainly be a superficial feeling of connection among members and with leadership.
For example, Marcus, the director of programming at Twitch, was in charge of community there when the company was already serving tens of millions of users a month. A few years ago, while Twitch was upgrading its back-end software, the company accidentally deleted days of video archives for the “Twitch Play Pokemon” (TPP) phenomenon. TPP invited Twitch users to play Pokemon using Twitch chat. Over one million users participated.
Marcus explained that by any standard, the archive loss was a big failure. When the mistake was discovered, there were several options for how to handle it. Marcus was proud to tell me that instead of hiding the problem and hoping to resolve the failure secretly, the company stood by its value of transparency. Marcus personally contacted the leaders of the TPP community with over 150,000 users. He admitted that the archives had been deleted and told them that the company had assigned four engineers to retrieve the videos, although no one knew how or when they’d fix the loss. It took weeks. Marcus strongly believes that the honesty in admitting failure in this example and others built lasting trust with Twitch users.
Members need opportunities to share their own stories, whether in formal or informal venues (or both). This helps them feel that they’re seen and understood. It also helps members understand the shared values in the community. These stories share the real challenges people faced and how those challenges shaped the teller’s current character.
Consider the communities to which you feel most connected. My guess is that there were opportunities, even informal gatherings, where you got to learn and share personal stories. These stories may be the most important part of your experience. They can include how members recovered from sickness, overcame grief, or simply got through a tough project. It’s possible that sharing your stories is a way to make an investment in a particular community. This can radically change a community if the stories are dear to you. The community can feel more like “your” community because you’ve entrusted it with a piece of yourself.
My friend Emily works for a famous movie studio I’ll call Neptune Studios. She recently told me about a time when one of the company’s middle managers (not an executive) learned that her daughter had been diagnosed with a neurological disease that meant over her life she would gradually lose function and eventually not be able to care for herself. While there’s no cure, there’s ongoing research to find a cure, or at least therapies that can help.
Filmmakers at the studio wanted to help. Many artists at the studio make world-famous characters and stories, and they came together and created an art auction of personal work, putting several hundred pieces up for charity auction at Neptune. After hearing about the auction, company management agreed to cater it. The event raised significant funds to reach a cure or treatment for the sick child. This story tells Emily that the Neptune community cares about more than making movies and pocketing profits. She works at a place where people care for one another and will create the extraordinary to help. It makes her more comfortable and committed every day.
If you are a part of a community that is dear to you now, you may not have noticed that learning stories like these that are in the community made you feel more deeply connected and welcome. Maybe you have noticed. In any case, as we invite others to join us in our most important communities, giving them a chance to learn and share the most important stories can make a world of difference. This can even happen over coffee, across from a campfire, or walking up a mountain. How are your members learning and sharing stories?