The Invisible Rules Preventing Change In Your Startup Community

A few years ago, I sat through my third "mentorship kickoff" in as many years, in three different cities that all swore this time that this vital programming would stick. Same energy in the room. Same nodding. Same six months later, when I'd ask around and get the same shrug: "yeah, that kind of fizzled out."

It took me embarrassingly long to figure out why. It wasn't that the idea was bad. It's that a single event, no matter how well-run, isn't strong enough to beat an entire system that's built to produce a different outcome.

Here's the thing about a system change (borrowed from Seth Godin): it's just a set of interlocking incentives, norms, and defaults that produce a predictable result. If you change only one input — a single campaign, a single hire, a single event — the system absorbs it like a rock dropped into a pond. Ripple, ripple, for a brief moment, then flat again. To actually shift the outcome, you need enough interlocking pieces moving at once for the whole thing to settle into a new pattern instead of drifting back to the old one.

This is the part I want us all to really think about, because I think it's the part most well-meaning community builders skip: isolated interventions (usually operated by single individuals) fail specifically because the rest of the system keeps pulling people back to their old habits. And let me be clear: it is a natural human tendency to default to the belief that we only control the one thing we are doing. “If this works, I have done my part – I cannot change what is not in my control.”

You can host the best mentorship mixer in the state, but if the informal norm is still "members guard their Rolodex," your mixer is a temporary exception, not a new rule. Everyone goes back to their corner on Monday.

So what actually works for systemic change? Not another program. A change in the defaults.

It becomes normal — not celebrated, not incentivized with a plaque, just normal — for founders to mentor other founders without being asked. It becomes normal for introductions to flow horizontally, founder to founder, instead of being gatekept by whoever happens to control the Rolodex or the invite list. It becomes normal for the question "who should be in this conversation?" to include the founder who moved here eight months ago, not just the ones who've been on stage before.

None of that shows up on an event calendar. That's exactly why it works. Defaults are invisible until you notice you're no longer fighting them.

I think about the communities that have genuinely changed their trajectories, and none of them did so with one big swing. They did it by exhibiting new behaviors and actions for days/weeks/months, reinforcing the norms desired for systemic change.

So if you're planning your next big initiative, ask yourself first: is this changing a default, or is it just another rock in the pond?