Guest Author: Amanda Lea Kaiser

“Don’t misbehave, say the wrong thing, or be bad!!! Now, go be creative.”  This is the weird internal monologue I have nearly every time I read codes of conduct or participate in a ground rules-setting exercise. We tell people what they can’t do and hope they bring their best, most generous, and creative selves to the conversation.

Too heavy-handed and codes of conduct or ground rules may make a community quiet, but they are often ignored. Either way, neither is very engaging.

It’s an interesting challenge to flip non-engaging elements into engaging elements, so I’ve been playing with the idea of Reverse Ground Rules.

In the last Member Engagement Lab (missed it? Don’t worry, there’s another on March 21st), a participant asked, “What are Reverse Ground Rules?” Three more people piled on to say they wondered, too. So here it goes!

Reverse Ground Rules give people tips on how to behave. They get a sense of the desired behaviors, mindsets, and interaction styles that will create a positive culture for their member community. Reverse Ground Rules are more about what participants can do than what they can’t.

And there are no rules about how these rules need to look.

During the Virtual Networking Incubator, the participants, my partners at Matchbox, and I created the Golden Rule Haiku.