Design to Thrive

3. Encourage your leaders and elders to share mythologies

The stories members tell each other are important because they guide behavior in the network or community, and as a result, you will want to encourage leaders and elders in your community to tell the stories you want to serve as models (both positive and negative) for your organization. For example, in the case of the social network we built for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, one of the most popular and successful ways we did this was to create a “Share Stories Archive” where we asked members to share stories that they thought others in the BGCA movement needed to hear. Behind the scenes, we asked some of the leaders in our network to “seed” the discussion by sharing some of their ...