How can mental models help us build a better community?
The increasing trend of technology has made people smarter. They now have the luxury of making efficient decisions with the help of various technologies. They can now decide which product is best for them. All of this is only possible because of online community building. What an online community does is that it brings people closer as they can interact, share their ideas, etc. How can online community building be made effective, though? Well, there are many ways to enhance an online community. Here, we will talk about some of the mental models that can help us to improve the quality of an online community.
1. Multiply By Zero
In mathematics, if you multiply anything by zero, the product itself becomes zero. The same applies to this mental method. We can apply this principle to make a great online community. This means that if we have to make a community that brings together millions of people, we then have to focus on all key areas. If we miss any area, it’d mean that our overall progress would become zero. So, we have to consider all the factors and work on all of them, individually.
2. The Pareto Principle
Although all areas are important for building a great online community, there are certain key areas or key variables which have a greater impact. These areas need to be addressed the most as these will give more fruitful results. For example, if we figure out how to enhance the connectivity between the people, we’d be able to make our community stronger.
3. Activation Energy
As in chemistry, every reaction needs some sort of energy to get started, the same can be applied to other fields as well. If we can create that little spark, that little motivation, that little energy in people, we can compel them to get closer. This will eventually make the community stronger and stronger.
4. Leverage
If we go by the definition, leverage simply means to apply force in such a way that output per input is maximized. We can apply this method to enhance an already existing community by simply implementing innovative ways which will ease the difficulties of communication.
5. Second-Order Thinking
Almost all individuals use first-order thinking to anticipate the results of their actions and it is easy. But since everyone does it, it isn’t that effective. On the other hand, those people who use second-order thinking excel more. To build an online community, we can use second-order thinking as well. This will help us to know the consequences, subsequent effects of all the actions that we’ll do and we’ll be able to predict where we need to improve.
6. Inversion
Building a successful online community isn’t easy, we will face a lot of problems in creating one such community. But if we use this method of inversion to approach those problems, we’ll be able to rectify our mistakes early. As we’d be approaching the problems in a reverse direction while many people just do that in the forwarding direction only.
7. Ecosystems
If we apply the concept of an ecosystem to an online community, we can bring together different people from different parts of the world. To do that, we first need to address some issues, such as the language barrier. If we can sort all these issues, we can create a community that will grow very quickly.
8. Sampling
To build a great, large online community, we can first build a community on a small scale that can be used as a sample. We can experiment with different things in this small community and note down the results. Once we finish all the experiments, we can then use that data and information to take that community to a large scale.
