Helping with the Hard Part
One way to think about OOC-design is that you’re trying to figure out How to Help With the Hard Part.
Different members will experience different aspects of the journey to be most “hard.” But your OOC isn’t supposed to help with every step of the journey for all possible people.
By planting a flag, picking a fight, and positioning yourself to attract a certain type of member, you render some parts of the journey “easy” (for your particular members) and other parts “hard” (for your particular members).
Which allows you to ignore the easy bits and focus on where your interventions and support are most valuable. This is why pinning down your member context is a precondition for the rest of OOC design.
*Example: In my authors community, members tend to know what they want to write about and how to write clearly, so we don’t spend any time “helping” with those areas (if we tried, it would just be busywork).
They are, however, quite busy with jobs and kids, and they face practical challenges with making the time and doing the work, which we help with via live working sessions. *
But if we positioned ourselves to attract a different type of author, then their “hard part” would be totally different, which means that our community design would change as well.
If you want to help in a specific, pre-determined fashion (e.g., working sessions, courses, knowledgebase, group challenges, masterminds, etc.), then you’ll want to pick a journey and positioning to attract folks who stand to benefit from that particular type of help.
Conversely, if you care primarily about who you are helping, then it’s prudent to be a bit agnostic about how exactly you’re going to do so (since it may turn out that the deep knowledgebase doesn’t actually help with their particular “hard part”).
Imagine OOC design-space as having three dimensions: you’re helping 1) some type of person, 2) along some journey, 3) via some sort of support structure. (Who-where-how.)
In order to give yourself enough flexibility to design something good, you’ll need to be able to relax at least one of those three constraints.
Example (cont): With the authors group, we were strongly opinionated who and where, but agnostic about how, which gave us the flexibility to design/discover ways of helping that aligned with the flag we planted, the fights we were picking, and all other aspects of our positioning.
If you going into it with all three things (who-where-how) tightly defined, it’s very possible that you end up putting a ton of effort creating support that doesn’t actually help with anybody’s hard part.