Story that still resonates with me as I remember watching a video of a regional competition.
There's a woman competing who was clearly not in a really good shape, and she had that a lot of extra weight.
And she was by far the last person on the course completing the crossfit competition.
And I remember in the video, the crowd at the competition had not just had cheered for the winners and then gone about their way and let the last competitors finish.
They'd actually gather around this last competitor and cheered loudly when she finished.
The biggest cheers were for the last athlete.
And the reason was we were honoring the effort, not the performance.
Hello, and welcome to the Art of Community Conversations.
My name is Seth Resler, and I'm the founder of Community Marketing Revolution.
And this is a series of Conversations inspired by the International Bestseller, The Art of Community.
There is a new second edition of the book coming out, which has 25% more content, and that book was written by Charles Vogl.
Charles is also the co author of Building Brand Communities's bookie that he wrote with Carrie Melissa Jones and which won an Axiom business book Gold Medal.
Charles's work has been used to develop leadership programs at Google, Airbnb, Twitch, Amazon, and the US army.
He has presented at the Yale Leadership Institute, Harvard Law School, the Stanford graduate school of business among others, and he joins us now.
Welcome, Charles.
Hi.
How are you? Hey, Seth.
It's good to be back and spend time with you.
Yeah.
So we are if if you've been with us for these conversations, you know that the book, the Art of Community has seven principles of community in it.
And we've essentially been taking them one by one, talking about each and really dissecting them.
And so this has been a great series of conversations.
Today, we are talking about the stories principal.
So let's get into it.
Let's just start with a quote from the book.
You say 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.
So let's start there.
Talk a little bit about how stories can do this.
How can stories deepen a community's connections? Well, for example, when people are exploring a community and wanna know if they wanna join, be that a biking community or a podcasters community or an authors community.
Uh, they wanna know, what do you all do? Um, how is this helpful? Uh, what actually brings you all together such that you're not spending your time with other bikers or podcasters or authors? And, uh, the way we typically learned that is through stories.
And that may be obvious.
Uh, what's not obvious is how then people who are visiting, for example, can get those stories.
Is there a place where those stories will be shared? Is there a resource where they can learn them? Is there a resource where people who are exploring because their bikers or podcasters, uh, can find those stories to learn, oh, these are my people, and this is what make this group of people different from any other group I could participate in.
You know, also once the group is already together, and they're growing together and participating together, uh, the stories help us understand who that group is for one another.
That makes the group important whatsoever.
So, again, if there's no time where those stories be shared.
If there's no resource where those stories can be learned, uh, there's a lot of opportunity to knit together those people around those shared values and purpose.
So I wanna talk a little bit about some of the different types of stories that we tell in community building, and you go through these in the book, starting with an origin story.
And I think when when I hear the term origin story, the first thing I always think of is superheroes.
You know, there's always that first movie that comes out where you learn the origin of Thor or you learn the origin of Ironman or the origin of Superman or whatever.
But what do you mean when you talk about Origin stories? Well, it's actually very similar, Seth.
You know, what you already know about superheroes is it almost doesn't matter exactly what the powers of the superhero are or said differently, um, what the possibilities of what they can do are? What matters more important is what formed them.
What motivates them to do what they do.
So there may be another character that has the strength of Spidermen and can walk up walls and, uh, maybe even swing on webs.
But if they're not motivated by the by the call to work on justice because if in the case of Peter Parker, he doesn't work on justice, uh, kind is that people are gonna get hurt.
So he needs to risk his own safety in order to help people.
He does not yet know.
Then that character is not nearly as compelling as Spiderman.
So the same is true with a community.
Uh, there may be a community of bicyclists or media podcasters.
And, uh, maybe they have resources on how to podcast better or how to, you know, grow stamina and bicycling.
But we wanna know when we're thinking about why do I wanna participate? What started this group of vice plus or podcasters gathering? Is it because we all wanna become rich as quickly as possible by podcasting and getting the Vegas audience as possible, you know, no matter what we have to put out or is the origin story about Seth understanding there was a lot of pain out there and wisdom he wanted to share for people looking for it and wanting to make it ever more available type thing.
So the origin story will tell people who are seeking your community and people in it, you know, what is the kernel of motivation that is motivating all of our activities together? You might say Charles, a lot of communities are gathering that had really ugly starts because they were from the early twentieth century and they're really racist or they're about domination, but we don't do that anymore.
Now it's really about supporting friends in the neighborhood.
Fair enough.
That's a story.
There's a story about how we originally were gathered to be exclusive, or we originally started, uh, to make sure that we would dominate another group by banding together and sharing resources.
But since then, there's been a change.
Now we are different.
Now we are much more inclusive or now we're much more generous.
So that's a story.
And when we're inviting people to participate and we want them to ever more invest, then having them understand how we started and what we became makes the big difference on informing them, do they wanna be a part of it and how much? Is the idea here that the potential members or once they become members, the members of a community somehow see themselves the origin story or a reflection of themselves or a reflection of their values? Exactly right.
That the the origin story, uh, syncs with their own values.
So I know you enough, Seth, that I know you don't want participate in podcasting group that says, we started because we wanted to get as many viewers as possible, uh, make as much money as possible and learn how we can surf the trends of interest on the internet.
You don't wanna be making hat videos because hat videos are trending.
Right? It's just like, that's just not how you are.
Um, you wanna share ideas that you think you're gonna help people who are doing things that you think are helpful, uh, in media.
So an origin story that talks about, hey, there's this guy named Charles, and he started a podcast.
He didn't have a lot of traction.
So he started tracking trends on Google, making episodes and whatever trend was coming up, and now he's a big podcaster, like, that's not gonna interest you, even though Mike technically be a podcasting, uh, community with podcasting lessons.
In this case, that origin story would repel you until you found origin story that resonated with your interest in creating media that is actually enriching people's lives no matter what the trends were doing in the rest of the internet.
I'm actually thinking back to the superheroes as we're talking about this and sort of the difference in their origin story.
I mean, Superman is from a planet that blew up and he's alone.
There's nobody like him in his universe, which is different than, say, the Hulk who, you know, views his superpowers as a burden and and wishes he didn't have it because he grows into this thing that he can't control, uh, versus Peter Parker, who you mentioned, who is a is a teenager and just trying to grow up and be a normal teenager and, and, uh, uh, you know, so on and so forth.
And they're all just a little bit different.
You can see why different people would identify with one over the others, and I can see why that would be the same thing in community, where the origin big story becomes important, and people want to find a community that they feel they identify with, uh, or that shares their values.
I would say they're not a little bit different, Seth.
I'd say they're radically different.
And what we expect of them differs because of their motivations that stem from that origin story.
So that's origin stories.
Let's talk about a different type of stories that communities have.
Uh, and you call this sharing values stories.
Give me an example of what you mean by that.
So, uh, if I'm visiting a community or I'm part of it and wanna just choose how much I'm gonna invest, uh, someone can tell me what the values are, but that doesn't usually mean very much, and there might be values listed on the website somewhere, and I don't think anybody cares.
It's the stories of how that community, uh, actually manifest those values that are gonna matter to me.
And one of the stories that really residents with me as for years, my wife and I have been crossfitters.
A story that still resonates with me is I remember watching a video of a regional competition.
On the video, there's a woman competing who is clearly not in really good shape, and she hadn't had a lot of extra weight.
And she was by far the last person on the course completing the crossfit competition.
And I remember in the video, the crowd at the competition had not just adhered for the winners and then gone about their way and let the last competitors finish, they'd actually gather around this last competitor and cheered loudly when she finished.
And we had a sing and crossed it in the early days about the values, and that was the biggest cheers were for the last athlete.
And the reason was we were honoring the effort not the performance because everybody only has the performance they have on any given day.
Uh, but we can recognize that they're putting in great or their best effort.
And we know that, um, it's harder for someone who doesn't yet have the fitness to complete event while they're on the course longer than the fit athlete to do it quickly.
And so someone who's not in shape and takes a longer time can get just as big cheers as the person does it quickly or said differently, we share that we valued the effort and the commitment more than the performance.
And that still resonates with me, and that's one of the reasons why I'm still part of and excited to be part of my Crossfit community because that's what we honor.
So if I'm hearing you right, these values stories serve the same purpose as a mission statement, but are a more effective way to show that action and to really express that in a way that people can understand it and internalize it.
But they're connected.
I think a mission statement as being a, uh, an effort to clarify an aspirational set of values.
And my understanding of mission statements is the mission statements aren't that important.
It's the process to craft mission statement that's important.
Because it forces the conversation what is our mission statement.
But you could put anything you want on a wall.
It doesn't take very long.
It's not very hard.
What's harder is actually living a life consistent with the values that we state we wanna live by.
And the stories of our experience in the community, uh, is actually what reveals are those values present.
Do they matter? So let's talk about another type of story that you mentioned in the book, and that is stories where people share vulnerabilities.
Uh, give me an example of this and why is this important? Yeah.
If we don't see vulnerable stories, uh, if we don't see vulnerabilities shared in the community, then it gives us the suspicion that, uh, the presentation of how great the committee is and the members and the leaders, that it is either blind to its flaws and failures, or it's all pretense.
Because we know that in the real world, people have flaws and there are failures.
When I was doing the research for the book, I had a long conversation with Marcus Graham, who at the time was executive with Twitch, and Twitch at the time was a gathering place for a roughly quarter million people, uh, largely around videos about video gaming.
And he shared with me that in development of Twitch where they really worked to be a platform that brought people together around, uh, their shared enthusiasm for video games.
Uh, there was a time where they made an upgrade to their platform where they lost thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of a very important part of their platform, uh, around Pokemon.
As you can imagine, enraged untold tens of thousands of members that this video was just gone.
And, uh, Marcus wanted to know not only how they could go find that video and get it reposted again, but also how they could maintain and repair the broken trust with their members.
And he shared with me how he immediately went to the leaders of this, um, Pokemon group on Twitch and said, um, we messed up.
Uh, we did something that broke this platform, and it is, in fact, broken.
And, uh, I don't know what it's gonna take to get it back.
I don't know how long it will take to get it back, but I can tell you that we are committing this number of engineers to get it back.
And eventually, after some weeks, they were able to get the video back and repair the platform, but he shared with me because right away he had been honest that they had messed up and they needed to fix it as an organization.
It maintained the trust with the members even though there was this big breakdown in the platform.
Whereas if he had just said, in so many words, look, we're talented technical people.
We have engineers.
Sometimes things go wrong, but there's nothing to see here.
Just trust us.
He thinks he would have engendered a lot of resentment and, uh, mistrust.
So he recognized sharing a vulnerable story where they messed up was really important in maintaining the strong relationships they had with the people who entrusted them with their time.
Yeah.
I could see how that would build trust.
I can also see how, you know, we had a conversation, for example, about uh, temples, essentially spaces where communities gather that being in a space like that makes it easier or or at least makes you feel safer when you are telling these vulnerable stories.
When you know the other people who are in there, and we've also talked about having the sort of the right people in there and and being able to tell those vulnerable stories in places like that.
So I see how that becomes important.
Uh, another type of story that you talk about is personal story worries.
What do you mean by this? We need to give participants a time in a venue to share how participating in that community, whatever it is.
Affects them.
If we don't do that, then all that's coming out are the official stories from leadership.
And, um, it makes us suspect as members, you know, what's really happening to people who are participating.
And, uh, this is probably gonna happen when people gather around shared meals and whatnot.
But I've I've learned that for many organizations, they take it for granted that this happens.
They may not provide time for those stories to be shared If I'm thinking about whether I wanna participate in your podcasting community, for example, or if I want to commit more, it's gonna make a profound difference to me to hear from other members.
Look, uh, spending time in Seth Podcast Group has really enriched my life.
It's really moved the needle and me growing into who I want to be.
So if you're sat there gonna ask me to participate more, it's gonna be critically important that I get access to people who can share personally how to assess podcasting group make a difference for me and how and why they're looking for more so they can grow into who they wanna be.
So as you're talking about this, you know, the majority of my career has been spent in media, you know, with content creators.
And So I find myself in a situation where I am often, uh, distinguishing between an audience and a community.
And in an audience, the stories are one way communications top down.
And what you're saying here and and in the community, there there's your creating a space and allowing people to come together and connect.
And that's where these stories start to come not just, like you said, from the leadership, but from the members themselves, uh, as they're participating in the community or potentially bringing in new members and and letting them know what happened in the community.
So providing space for that to happen, it sounds like Yeah.
What's so up for me as you mentioned that, Seth, is I've been, uh, invited to many educational institutions.
And in virtually every one of them, someone says something to the effect of.
We want parents more involved.
And I understand it.
God bless them.
You can invite parents to events.
You can tell parents what you want them to volunteer for, and, you know, what guests you want them to give.
If you wanna get parents more involved, one of the things that will make a difference of the many things you talked about is parents hearing from other parents how getting involved with that school has helped them be who they wanna be, which is hopefully better parents or better members of the community, they're more generous, more committed, and making it more safe.
So parents hearing the stories of other parents on how being involved made a difference will make a difference on whether other parents want to get more involved and invest more.
It sounds simple, but you can imagine if all the messages are just from the head of the school, sending out messages and making announcements of what volunteer slots are open.
Uh, that's not gonna be nearly as powerful as the parents here.
Wow.
Because I volunteer in these things, all these great things have happened in my life.
Friends that I've made, experiences that I've had, uh, things that I've learned to help me be the person I wanna be.
One of the things that you talk about in the book is that the stories can change over time.
Talk to me a little bit about how these stories can evolve in a community? It could be that, for example, a bison group originally gathers as brought together by men who want to, uh, win races.
And then it could be that they get older.
And that they're no longer winning races, and it could be that they're inviting people who are not men to bike with them.
And it could be that that community evolves into, uh, people who just wanna bike along the beach and enjoy friendship and maybe cold beverages on warm days.
So there may be an origin story about, uh, guys gathering in the nineteen eighties to win races, but that story of the origin and the story of why people gather has evolved, and that can really, uh, help inform people who are showing up to understand what is the community today because the story is now different.
Let's get practical here.
Let's say I am somebody who is looking to start a community or responsible for growing a community.
How should I be thinking about storytelling and using that in my community? I mean, is that something that I should be sitting down and making up out of whole cloth? Is it something that, uh, I I should sort of be cultivating? What do you recommend? Right.
Well, let's preface everything I wanna say with Seth that, you know, the book is, you know, a couple hundred pages long.
I think of it at some levels like a cookbook.
When you make a meal, you don't have to fry and braise and steam and barbecue for every meal.
And that would be kinda silly.
Right? So if you're to cookbook and you think you have to do everything for every meal, you become overwhelmed.
You don't do anything or you think it's just too much work.
Um, that is that's not how cooking works.
Right? So, uh, yes, it's very important to think about stories at some point as communities mature, but I don't want anybody listening to think, oh, gee, we have to have a story portal and and story time right away.
And if we don't, we're failing.
As communities emerge and grow and become mature, we just want to be aware that stories are a critical part of that and maybe augment how people get access to them in time.
We want to make sure that people that you want to join the community and inevitably people who are in the community have access to the stories.
So you need to put those stories somewhere that where they can get them.
You can choose any medium you want.
I don't know if that's a newsletter.
I don't know if that's blog posts.
I don't know if that's interviews.
But you want people to hear, uh, these are the stories that we think you are important.
And if you wanna join our community because you like bicycling or podcasting or skiing, we want you to understand these stories.
And so you get access to them at any time, for example.
Another way to think about it is if there are certain stories we want new members to get about how we do things, why we do them, and how we learn that, then you need to arrange time for them to be with elders where they can learn those stories.
And if they're not getting that time, then let us not be surprised.
They're not getting those stories and we're missing a tool, an element that could be really powerful in binding us to the community.
And one of the things that you can think about is, um, how are you curating the stories you're sharing? I'll give you an example.
I was invited to come to a very big, uh, church with a very large building in New York City.
It might be block big in my memory.
And they were not getting the kind of membership and attendance they wanted.
And, uh, I explained, but when I just showed up to your building, it was so intimidating, and it looks like it was built for the richest people in the world to show people that the richest people in the world with this giant church.
I said, oh, no.
No.
No.
Our church is very social justice oriented.
In fact, um, we were very involved with the apartheid movement in South Africa years ago.
In fact, that was funded and supported from the church.
And I said, That's fantastic that you're telling me this in your office when I have an appointment with you.
But if I'm a visitor and I want to find out what you're about, I have no access to that story that this church has been a pillar of equality and social justice for generations.
Said differently, they hadn't thought about how they were curating the stories a visitor would get to understand the values they wanted to share with people.
Instead, uh, all we were getting is, wow, you had a lot of money to build a really fancy building in New York City that towers over everything else.
So those are three things that you can think about and see if that can inform how you're relating to people who are visiting with you and the members that when we're reminded why they're committed to your community.
Alright.
There it is.
That is the stories principle.
One of the seven principles, uh, in the art of community.
Uh, we're gonna be back, and we're gonna talk about more.
Charles, I I'm loving these conversations.
Thank you so much for being a part of these.
It's wonderful to get this time you, sir
