On Organizing a Tribe
What does it mean to create a mobile society?
I’ve never been to Burning Man. Listening to stories from numerous friends coming back from the famous community event, I kept hearing things like “it’s an experience that stays with you long after” or “Burning Man isn’t a place, it’s a feeling.” It’s hard to say that you can relate to something so subjective. After a recent gathering on a small island off the coast of Essex, I felt one common sentiment between myself and my friends attending the desert gathering: part of something bigger. Attempting to entirely grasp something so complex and diverse like the Sandbox Network is a task that has yet to be solved and probably never will be. Yet I believe it is a sign that you’re on to something. And that you have one helluva journey ahead.
Sandbox identifies the world’s most exceptional under-30 leaders and accelerates them from the point of local impact to global influence. Over the past few years, Sandbox has curated a group of extremely talented entrepreneurs, inventors, artists, academics, designers, adventurers, politicians, social innovators, story tellers and business leaders; and has gathered them in trusted environment where they can build meaningful relationships, learn from each other and gain access to opportunities that will help them grow and increase their impact.
It wasn’t the first time I’d felt connected to something so intangible and initially online. After a serendipitous encounter on Couchsurfing four years ago, I was recommended a website for a fledgling Amsterdam-based community called Knowmads. Describing topics including sustainability, social innovation, (personal) leadership and new business design, I was intrigued. With just these topics and a set of values (autonomy, purpose, mastery, interconnectedness), twelve international and entrepreneurial young people came together to form the first “tribe”. We had a room with a table and eight chairs.
While the first-ever Sandbox ambassadors gathering was a bit more than just a table without enough chairs and has a much longer history, it also felt like the beginning of something. With a network of almost 1,000 members comprised of almost 30 cities (hubs) across the globe, a staggering 95% of the ambassadors (local leadership for the hubs) were present to help shape the future of the community. At the opening evening, the CEO (yes, there’s a CEO) shared his vision for the network becoming the world’s first mobile society. As many members stood up to share what Sandbox meant to them, the “Knowmad” in me felt connected. Questions from my local community also began surfacing as we explored our capacity to create global cohesion combined with local flavor over the course of the weekend.
The Berlin hub, one of the network’s oldest in both demographic and time in the global network, has a rich flavor. When a tech entrepreneur started splitting his time between Zurich and Berlin, he began to host Sandbox events in the city. Then came the innovation camp, Palomar 5, where 30 people under 30 lived in a Berlin warehouse developing projects focused on the future of work. Then came Rainer. We’re the hub that gave Sandbox global a line often used to showcase the diversity of our members: Sandbox even has an accomplished opera singer. That was one of the hub’s first ambassadors. When Rainer first met the fledgling group of Berlin Sandboxers, his only ambition was to meet, inspire, and get inspired. And I believe that ambition stays in the collective DNA of the hub and global community as a whole.
While our local flavor is strong, familial, and prone to global collaboration, it’s also suspicious of a pervading sense of corporatism that comes with being a community backed by a venture capitalist. We’re a family, literally. With three kids now borne into our local hub, the sense of family the five Swiss founders first set out to create when starting the community very much prevails here. As this community grows, some questions beg to be asked. Why does the community want to grow? And how fast can it without losing the intimate connections it’s creating offline?
Why, after three years in Sandbox, did I begin to truly feel this connection to something bigger than myself? As this Wired piece points out, thanks to the internet, geography is becoming less and less important to connect with your tribe. However, creating an intimate connection between people through meaningful conversation and physical touch can never be replaced by the digital space. On a larger scale, does digitally curating a like-minded tribe (who is able to gather offline) help build the mobile society we wish for? How does this new societal structure affect our sense of comraderie with the neighbors living next door?
Depending on the ambitions of the network and how Sandbox as a hybrid model develops, perhaps we will never truly address some of these things. The challenges sustaining authentic relationships in such a wide-spread growing “family” like Sandbox may be challenging enough. Without becoming too philosophical, ask yourself what it means to have a relationship in the digital age. Can any of those elements be authentically translated to the digital space? Can they begin to properly compliment our interactions there? In an age where millennials seem to be ‘becoming their brand’, we seem to communicate more and more, yet connect less and less. The ability to translate between these two worlds could very well be the greatest psychological challenge facing our generation. This relates to the struggle I see with Sandbox growing—growth tends to breed efficiency. We all know human relationships are far from efficient mechanisms.
Optimistically speaking, Sandbox could be a place where a new generation can turn to for support without feeling as if they are speaking to a brand during every human interaction they have. Is this our vision for Sandbox — a diverse mobile society—or is it more about creating a tight-knit global family where intimacy is valued above all else? I’d like to think it’s both. However, bridging this gap may be one of the biggest social challenges we as a community face at the moment.
Ultimately, Sandbox has the power to serve as a microcosm for a world we want to live in. With it’s rich familial history, seemingly contradictory connection to money (in some members’ opinions) and an ability to speak so passionately to a new generation, Sandbox will have to explore what it means to serve a movement, sustain a network, and build a business.
Currently, the learning community Knowmads, has ballooned into 8 tribes in Amsterdam and has organically spread to Hanoi and Seville over a four-year growth period. Burning Man takes on a less location-based approach to it’s global strategy. These models transform themselves — and that’s normal if not necessary. Differentiating between what these communities are, what they aren’t, and what they aspire to be is an important ideal we must also hold ourselves to. Learning from others before us who have experienced similar growth processes and trusting in our own ability to learn from each other within the community will be crucial. Finally, remembering that it’s not even a ‘what’ we talk about is perhaps most important. After all, it’s a community of people.
As for most, Sandbox will always be more than a networked community. For me, it really is a family. Above all else, it’s “the people I’ve met and the things we’ve built together” (to quote one of it’s founders). It’s an experiment in what it means to create a mobile society. It’s an ongoing conversation. We’ll never know unless we try, admit our shortcomings, and attempt to see our blind spots. Without the people I’ve met in Sandbox, I don’t know if I’d be half as competent in those areas as I am today. For them, I am eternally grateful. And I think we can all agree that the world needs more support systems like that.
credit: a big thanks to all the people who helped me (and continue to help me) explore this topic: Franziska Kruger, Rainer Scheerer, Michel Bachmann, Alexa Clay, Alexandre Terrien, Henrik Storm Dryssen, and the Sandbox community at large.
