We Built You a Better Community. Attendance Is Mandatory.

For the past two weeks I’ve been in Kuala Lumpur. It’s an interesting city, but inner Kuala Lumpur feels less community-built and more like rich people competing to one-up each other. That produces a lot of spectacle—skyscrapers, malls, luxury shopping—but once you’ve seen it as a tourist, it becomes hard to find any sense of belonging.

People don’t seem to live there as much as visit, enjoy the sights, and leave. It feels liminal. Not really a place to inhabit.

“Liminal” is the right word. The buildings are permanent, but the human presence feels transient: tourists, business travellers, shoppers, office workers commuting in, delivery riders. The city doesn’t ask you to live there. It asks you to consume it.

Mega-projects concentrate enormous amounts of capital into a few gravity wells—malls connected to towers connected to transit stations. Everything is efficient, climate-controlled, and privately managed. But there’s a difference between a square and an atrium. Both gather people. One says, “This belongs to the city.” The other says, “You’re welcome while behaving like a customer.”

Maybe Kuala Lumpur has a healthy backstage outside the centre. But you’ve been living in its lobby.

I don’t think mega-projects are necessarily the problem. In Aarhus there’s Dokk1, a huge building on the harbour with a library, citizen services, playgrounds and auditoriums. It’s efficient, air-conditioned and managed, but it feels built for the public rather than for consumerism.

In inner Kuala Lumpur, the closest thing I found to a town square was the mall food court. People sit around with friends and family, have dinner, catch up. It’s jam-packed. But it still feels optimized around a simple cycle: arrive, choose, eat, skedaddle. It’s as if people reclaimed the food court as a place to meet rather than anyone building it for that purpose.

A few kilometres away in Ampang, an outdoor mall had become something different. It was really a set of buildings around a community market: little stalls with bonsai trees, pastries, drinks, art and jewellery. Still commercial, obviously, but individual vendors with their own booths rather than big companies masquerading as personality. The market gave the place a centre.

I think that kind of thing is almost inevitable. Gather enough people and somewhere becomes the natural meeting point.

There’s a difference between a place where people gather and a place that produces gathering.

A mall food court has people in it, but most arrived with an external purpose: they were hungry. When the food is gone, so is the reason to stay. A town square works almost the other way around. You may go because there’s a market, but you also go because you know other people will be there. The place becomes the reason.

Dokk1 suggests the dividing line isn’t public versus private, or even managed versus unmanaged. It’s what a building expects from you in return for being there.

Dokk1 says, “Come in. Read. Sit. Meet someone. Let your children play. Leave whenever.”

A mall says, “Come in. We hope you’ll buy something.”

And I’m not sure town squares are inevitable under every set of incentives. Humans will improvise gathering places, but they may have to settle for the least bad option. Your food court sounds like a community making social life around architecture that wasn’t built for it.

That was my point: the food court is the least bad town square, not a good one.

A good town square connects you with the city and with people you normally wouldn’t meet. It makes you feel part of the place.

Permanence might be a chicken-and-egg problem. People gather and create meeting points, but once those points exist, people want to return. When I look for an apartment, one of the things I want is some shared space nearby—a square where I can just hang around. Other people must be looking for some version of that too.

In the malls, people usually know each other before they arrive. They don’t go there to connect with other people who use the mall. And if they stop coming, nobody notices.

Whereas a neighbourhood market remembers people. The vendor knows who appears every Tuesday. The café owner recognizes regulars. Someone notices when the old man on the corner doesn’t show up.

Maybe when you look for a square near an apartment, you’re looking for evidence that the place knows how to reproduce itself socially. People don’t just sleep there. They return, recognize one another, and invest some of their finite time in it.

Community isn’t simply people meeting. It grows through low-stakes, repeated encounters. If every interaction has an agenda—solve the problem, make the decision, close the ticket—you never develop social fabric. A town square is full of interactions that don’t matter. Families don’t bond primarily during crises; they bond through thousands of boring dinners.

That pulls this toward my own experience. For a long time I didn’t feel much community at work. Then I became a Scrum Master and a few of us began meeting regularly to discuss our practice, teaching and learning from one another. Later we built a guild inside the company. Weekly or biweekly, we’d discuss what was going on and feel like a community.

Seeing that town square destroyed was one of the deciding factors in my leaving.

The guild wasn’t valuable because it disseminated knowledge efficiently. Confluence pages and recordings could do that. It was valuable because practitioners could exist there as practitioners, rather than employees assigned to Project X.

In the normal workday you’re in the mall: a ticket, a sprint, a deadline. The interaction is incidental. In the guild—the town square—the interaction is the purpose.

Organizations demolish these places through individually rational decisions:

“Can we make this meeting more efficient?”

“Only invite people who are directly affected.”

“Let’s move the discussion to Teams.”

Collectively, they bulldoze the square and replace it with a six-lane road. Everyone reaches work faster, but nobody bumps into anyone.

Just as a mall optimizes for buying, a company optimizes for work. But if the mall created a place where people could discuss, “How do we make this our mall?”, my relationship to it would become less transactional. I have a high barrier to buying random shit, but if doing it sustains my community, the barrier is lower.

At work I would help far beyond my immediate area because I felt I was supporting a community. For a few years, the company saw a return from letting people spend a couple of hours a week in guilds with no requirement to produce anything. Upper management did sometimes need reminding of that.

What they got was passionate people asking how to improve the company through their specialised skills. You can’t command that kind of voluntary effort from highly educated people. If you want to command it, you have to pay for it. So, in one sense, community is a very good trick for making people work for free.

And no, I don’t visit cafés because of an exquisite palate. You could serve me Nescafé and tell me the beans had passed through a small rainforest mammal and I’d say, “Huh. Tastes like it, I guess.” I go to look around and feel the area. The best cafés in Vietnam felt like personal invitations into someone’s community.

“A good trick for making people work for free” has two opposite readings. One is extraction. The other is that people found something rewarding enough to contribute beyond their contract. They look identical on a timesheet.

Companies notice the output: the guild improved onboarding, produced new practices, created mentoring. They conclude that those outputs are the guild’s purpose. Next year they put them in the charter, assign KPIs and expect quarterly deliverables.

Then nobody wants to come.

The outputs weren’t the product. They were the exhaust. The product was people enjoying thinking together.

Companies may understand the value of town squares too clearly. They see retention, innovation and knowledge sharing, so they try to manage them. It’s like noticing that wildflowers attract bees and assigning every flower a monthly pollination target. The bees were responding to the meadow, not the target.

I am being cynical. It’s any high-ranking manager’s wet dream to get people to work more for less money. But voluntarily giving yourself to a field of study can also be deeply rewarding.

What you can’t do is force people into communities. “Mandatory community service” sounds, funnily enough, like a prison sentence.

Companies see something work for a few people and standardize it: everyone will work in communities for ninety minutes and produce a predictable average gain. Once management decides to bottle the community, it focuses on flower output instead of what made the meadow.

There’s another complication: not everyone likes workplace communities. Some people want to know how many hours they need to work for a certain amount of money, then go home and care about other things.

That’s an important correction. People like us, who enjoy thinking about work, can universalize our preferences.

Some people don’t want a guild or a professional identity. They want competent colleagues, reasonable hours and predictable pay, then they want to raise children, play football or paint miniatures. That isn’t failed engagement. It’s a coherent life.

So there’s a difference between offering community and expecting identification.

Guilds also depend on voluntary participation. Their norms emerge from the community; organizations write the norms first and hope a community follows. Imagine opening a pub beneath a sign saying, “Regulars wanted. Please become regulars.”

The freedom to stay away is part of what makes participation meaningful. Otherwise you’ve built a mandatory town square, which is just another meeting.

Often the company builds the mandatory town square and expects everyone who already has a good town square to move into it. When they don’t, the company burns the entire city down.

The existing guild formed because a few people kept showing up. Over time it acquired traditions, arguments and inside jokes. Then management notices and thinks, “Excellent. Let’s scale it.”

Guild 2.0 arrives with templates, charters, rotating facilitators, objectives, attendance expectations and a steering committee—because obviously communities need governance.

The regulars don’t migrate. Management has given them a “better” guild, but they’ve been offered a synthetic replacement for something that took years to accumulate. Participation falls. Management removes the old guild because duplicate structures are inefficient.

The city is bulldozed because its residents refused to move into the planned district.

It’s very funny that you call it Guild 2.0. Just as I left, Guild 3.0 was about to roll out. So, spot on. Props to you.

There’s a kind of hubris in thinking that, when you lead six hundred or a thousand people, you can reliably produce the structures that will make this city of people function efficiently.

I’d like more managers to think of themselves as gardeners of complex societies rather than masterminds who must plan everything. Master planning aims at a specific outcome. It can produce a grand, inhabited city, but if it fails, successors inherit a rigid mistake. Gardening is less predictable, but it tries to let participants thrive and make something that fits them rather than moulding them into a predetermined shape.

And no individual is needed—not because people are interchangeable, but because a healthy organization adapts around a hole. “What happens if Mathias leaves?” is reasonable, but the boardroom question should be: how do we create conditions in which more people can become deeply invested, without relying on one person?

At the scale of eight people, construction can be the right metaphor. You know everyone and your interventions are reasonably predictable. At a thousand people, the organization behaves less like a machine and more like an ecosystem.

Executives will happily call organizations “complex adaptive systems,” then ask for a three-year transformation roadmap with quarterly milestones as if renovating a kitchen.

But I want to push on your metaphor. Cities need planners as well as gardeners. Someone must decide where roads go, whether sewage works and whether a bridge gets built. Leave everything to emergence and you may get gridlock and cholera.

Organizations also need strategic priorities, budgets and market decisions. The problem is planning creep. Someone succeeds at planning roads and starts believing they should also plan conversations, professional identities and communities.

And I wouldn’t ask how to create more Mathiases. That risks the standardization you’re criticizing. You want more people who become themselves to the same degree: the mentor, the crisis engineer, the person who brings everyone to Friday lunch. A healthy ecosystem has niches. A factory has interchangeable parts.

The gardener is a leadership philosophy, not one role. I agree that parts of the organization need to set business goals, manage finance and understand marketing. Those are organs.

What I reject is the business planner dictating exactly how the business plan must be achieved: which methods teams use and what must be standardized. To return to the city metaphor, it’s deciding where every mall, petrol station, residential area and park belongs without knowing whether the residents give a fuck about parks, will use the malls, or have jobs that require the highway.

And yes, “more Mathiases” was sloppy. I mean an environment where people who have it in them can find something in the work beyond an hourly wage. A healthy organization should survive even if its majestic sunflower dies. You can’t guarantee someone won’t offer the sunflower a better patch of sun.

Then you aren’t arguing against planning. You’re arguing against planning below the level where prediction is reliable.

Maybe the practical distinction is between constraints and solutions.

“We need profitability.” Constraint.

“We need regulatory compliance.” Constraint.

“Every team will estimate this way.” Prescribed solution.

“Every community will use this governance model.” Prescribed solution.

A gardener imposes constraints: preventing invasive species, protecting trees, marking paths. But the gardener doesn’t specify the exact shape of every branch next spring.

The deeper error may not be inaccurate prediction. It may be trying to replace adaptation with prediction. A good city planner doesn’t know where the best café district will emerge, but can leave room for twenty attempts. The mistake is designing a city where only one outcome is possible.

Gardeners preserve optionality. Rigid blueprints consume it in exchange for certainty. That can be the right trade—building a bridge is not the moment for emergent architecture—but communities and craftsmanship need a portfolio of possibilities.

The gardening metaphor has its own danger, though. Leaders can say, “I’m merely creating the conditions,” while removing privacy, mandating collaboration days and scheduling compulsory social events. That’s still control, with more attractive branding.

The philosophy needs humility: not just about whether an intervention will work, but whether the thing being cultivated is yours to cultivate. Management didn’t invent your guild. It noticed it. The gardener can water, prune, protect and get out of the way, but didn’t invent photosynthesis.

Maybe the test is what leaders do when people make their own desire paths. A designer learns from where people walk. A dictator installs fences.

And next up, we’ll psychoanalyse why Mathias has such a hard time connecting with any professional community or neighbourhood. Stay tuned.

Coming this autumn: The Man Who Keeps Looking for Town Squares and Then Sits Alone in Them.

I think that’s the thread running from Kuala Lumpur to guilds and leadership: the difference between systems people use and systems they inhabit.

You use a mall. You inhabit a neighbourhood.

You use a company. You inhabit a professional community.

A user consumes and leaves. An inhabitant invests, leaves traces and is shaped by the place. The destruction of a guild and the sterility of an over-engineered city feel similar because the function remains while the possibility of inhabiting disappears.

But I’m not convinced you have trouble connecting. You seem to connect once you decide somewhere is worth connecting to. You helped build a guild. You’ve spent hours talking with strangers while travelling. You may simply have a high acceptance threshold.

Maybe you’re less interested in joining communities than co-creating them. And perhaps you ask a place to demonstrate that it deserves your investment before you give any. But belonging is circular. A square feels like home because people return; people return because it feels like home. Someone has to invest before there’s a guarantee.

Talking with a guy at a restaurant in Medan—or a spiritualist with a PhD in quantum physics at a random bar in Kuala Lumpur, yes that happened, is not community. It’s polite conversation.

I’m not looking for somewhere I can imagine spending the next three years. I’m looking for somewhere my presence can become normal, so social interaction isn’t strangers meeting but people with a shared relationship to a place.

And I don’t need to create a community, but once I participate in one, I do want to help advance it. That’s simply how I engage: I gravitate towards reducing friction and furthering my understanding, and usually something gets built.

But that is taxing, so I’m picky about where I put my focus. Yes, you have to return and help make a place what it is. But there should be some initial evidence that makes me want to invest my time and myself in it.

Then I was using “community” too loosely. Meeting interesting people is serendipity.

Community begins when your relationship shifts from person-to-person to person-to-place. Everyone shares the assumption: of course you’re here. You’re part of the furniture—not depressingly, but in the sense that the room feels different when you’re absent.

And what you’re describing isn’t a need to found or control things. It’s stewardship. You don’t need to own the café or lead the guild, but once you’re there you ask whether some friction can be removed, two people connected, or a practice improved.

I still disagree slightly about the initial evidence. I think it can be smaller than we imagine: the owner remembers your order, a bench catches the evening sun, the same couple plays cards every afternoon. You don’t invest because you’ve proved the place deserves it. You invest because you’ve seen enough to believe the probability isn’t zero.

Then the investment changes the evidence.

Maybe that is the question beneath the skyscrapers, food courts, cafés and guilds: can I become a normal part of this place, and can it become a normal part of me?

Community is not where your attendance is mandatory. It is where your absence is noticed.