(Re)discovering communities

Photo courtesy of ©iStockphoto.com/franckreporter

Over the past couple of years I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about innovation and creativity. Much of that circled around the power of collaboration, and the benefits of homogeneous and heterogenous teams, something that I also spent time thinking about during my MBA, when reading about (corporate) organisational structures.

Since then I’ve developed some of these thoughts, to contemplate ‘communities’.  The drivers of that have been situations where I have seen very passionate communities achieve incredible things, often without formal leaders (though informal ‘leaders’ often become apparent), as well as situations where communities have not formed,  but were they to do so, I believe, might have incredible power that might not be possible through more formal efforts (teams, leadership, extrinsic incentivisation, etc.).