Guest: Anamaria Dorgo, Learning and Community Strategist, Founder of L&D Shakers
Published: March 24th, 2026
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Episode summary

A deep dive into the messy, magical, and entirely necessary work of building thriving communities of practice.

Anamaria Dorgo is a Romanian-born, Amsterdam-based community builder, learning experience designer, and the founder of L&D Shakers—a global community of over 8,000 learning professionals. With an insatiable curiosity and a self-described "rabbit hole energy," Anamaria brings a wealth of knowledge on how humans connect, share, and grow together. She understands firsthand the delicate balance of nurturing online and offline spaces where people can truly belong.

In this vibrant conversation, Anamaria shares why a community is the ultimate "learning playground" with zero stakes, explains the very real challenges of community burnout and over-engineering, and reveals her genius "Trojan mice" strategy for sneaking community-building into rigid corporate cultures. You'll also discover why making connection *too* easy might actually kill engagement, and why seeing someone's "dirty kitchen" is far more valuable than polished presentation slides.

Key topics

• 🛝 The "Learning Playground" advantage: Why communities of practice offer a safe space to fail, experiment, and learn. Without the pressure of quarterly goals or managers, members can take risks and flex new skills they can't practice in their day-to-day roles.
• 🐭 How to "Trojan Mice" community building: Why you don't always need permission to build a community in a rigid culture. Learn how to sneak connection into existing structures, like post-training leadership programs, without ever formally calling it a "community."
• 🍳 Why people want your "dirty kitchen": The end of the "sage on the stage" era and polished presentation slides. Practitioners crave the real, messy truth about what didn't work, what had to be dropped, and the struggles behind the successes.
• ⚙️ The necessary friction of connection: Why making it too easy to join a group or get matched actually kills long-term engagement. Understanding the delicate balance between seamless onboarding and the personal effort required to build genuine commitment.
• 🌊 Seeking ripples, not echoes: Why community builders must be patient and driven by deep passion. The impact of a community often travels outward like a ripple over time, rather than bouncing back immediately as measurable ROI.

Top quotes

"I call it like a personal learning playground, because there's no stakes in a community of practice. ... it's the learning mode, it's the failing mode, it's the I don't know mode."

"You don't need to have the answers as a community starter... the goal is for the conversations, the learning, and the impact to be as rich, if not richer, when you're not in the room."

"People are tired of sages on the stage, people are tired of the webinar... I wanna see your dirty kitchen, I don't care about your polished slides. Open the cupboards, where is the dust?"

"You don’t have to Trojan horse it... you can also Trojan mouse it. How do you bring or attach a community or collective on top of something that already exists?"

"I find when it's easy, we say yes to 200 things and obviously you can't do 200 things, and you definitely can't do them well."

Resources

• Whitepaper: Beyond the trade-off: Group learning for a world in transformation
• Book a Platform Demo

Full episode

Episode transcript

Mike Courian: Anamaria, welcome to the podcast.

Anamaria Dorgo: Thanks, Mike. Happy to be here.

Mike Courian: It's really lovely to have you. My favorite way to start these conversations is to ask each of our guests the same question, and so that question is in three words, I would love you to describe yourself to us. Three words that are top of mind when you're thinking about who is Anamaria and how would you invite us to sort of know you better.

Anamaria Dorgo: First word that came to mind is curious. So curiosity, linked to learning, learner. I'm constantly on the lookout for things, for resources, for people, for stuff to read, for stuff to watch. Have several agendas and, note, I'm taking notes digitally, I'm taking notes in notebooks, I'm taking notes all over the place. I take notes on my phone, on my laptop, everywhere. I do not have a structured way of taking notes also. I never tried that because I think I kind of knew that it's going to fail.

The second word would be collaborative. I love to work with others. I'm always smarter around other people, with other people. So I take a lot of energy from others. So curiosity, collaborative. And then, ah, now I miss the word, there was this word that scientists came up new with, whether you're extrovert or introvert, there was something in between, you know, like there was a new word that they came up with. So I keep having these debates with even really close friends. Are you an extrovert? Are you an introvert? Who are you? What are you? I think I'm somewhere in the middle. I take energy from folks and I take energy from being alone, and I need a bit of both in my life. So, balance. It's all in the balance. Maybe balance is the word.

Mike Courian: So with curiosity, collaborative, and this extra-intro balance persona, I'm curious, whether it's in a work context or outside of a work context, or in your wonderful world of communities, what would you say are your superpowers? Where does Anamaria shine?

Mike Courian: ...in contributing. This question, my subheading is 'no humility allowed'. So this is where you just fully get to brag about yourself. Imagine that everybody knew you and everybody knew this was true. What would you say?

Anamaria Dorgo: So, I think I see this in myself. Of course, I recognize this in myself, but I also a while back I did a bit of, if you like, research where I asked people close to me, friends. Well, when I started my business, I was like, hmm, who am I? What am I? What am I offering? What's my signature? Or what am I unique in? And people came back with things that were very heartwarming. I think my work, maybe the fact that I am connected now, I've been working with communities for the past seven years, six years, and I know people all over the world. I am spending a lot of time on social media, compared to you.

So that curiosity combined with all of this connectedness in people and human, I feel like I'm constantly exposed to ideas and resources. So that's a strength I feel like, particularly in my field and the field of learning and community. I know a bit about a lot of things. And this helps me to be very flexible in projects, whenever I'm meeting new people, whenever I'm starting something new, I always have a few threads to pull. I always so far knew where to start and how to get information, how to find the person with the answer. So I think that's a superpower that I'm noticing.

I am pretty fast going from idea to action. I've got an idea, I don't have to polish it too much. Sometimes I just run little experiments with myself alone, with people in communities, in L&D Shakers, on social media, and so on. So I really like that. It can also be a curse because I'm starting a lot of things, I really like to start things. My strength is not really in like going in depth and perfecting. It's like, I find that rather boring. So yeah, I think I...

Anamaria Dorgo: Say those are like two things that bubble to the surface for me now that come to mind.

Mike Courian: You've named three things that I see as really core to how I operate. The first one being it's coming out of that curiosity and that hunger for learning. So that's one of the themes. The second one I was thinking of that I'm sure you possess is connectedness. It's sort of seeing where things interlock. It's when somebody says something, you immediately kind of ping off of that with a subsequent idea. And that is one of my favorite things that I get to enjoy in myself. And then the third one, which I'm wondering if you have, is a theme called input. And input is this love of gathering resources and this love of sharing them. So it's bidirectional. And what you were just saying really mapped onto so many of those things and together they kind of get out of control in this wonderful way. And they all are just like, it's just, and they just, it's like a self-recharging battery. And it just keeps going and going and going. And you keep feeding it. And it is a blessing and a curse for me because if I didn't have a really strong sense of responsibility, those three would just run wild. And I would just, I don't know, I'd just be constantly in things and ideas. And it would never end. But then my responsibility kind of drags me back down to Earth and goes, no, Mike, you got to finish something. You got to like, whatever. Where I'm just like, whoa, that's so interesting. Whoa, that's so interesting. So I could really relate to that. Is that mapping onto your experience?

Anamaria Dorgo: You call this input. How fun. Yes, I definitely have a bit of a hoarding tendencies with ideas or resources. I could get better at structuring them as a second brain. I've been reading for a while into that and be like, oh, which tool is it, Notion? Like, where is it? I gave up on that, to be honest. Somehow I keep finding them. Like I, I, I know where to find them.

Anamaria Dorgo: Even though it's messy, in my brain it makes sense. But yes, I do a lot of saving of stuff, I do a lot of compiling of things, putting things together, a lot of sharing of the things I'm finding. I call this like a massive rabbit hole energy. So it's like, watch out if you open this or if you read this, it might suck you in and you're gonna be gone for a few hours. So, and then it's like, oh no, three hours have passed. Yeah, welcome back to Earth. But I just love it. I give, I take energy from it and that's where I get these, all of these ideas and indeed connection. So they're coming very handy, very often. I use them also sometimes. Not, not, not all the times, not everything, but I have been using them, so I know that they serve a purpose.

Mike Courian: Yes, 'cause that's, I'm the same. Is if it was just on the shelf, you'd start to become a bit dubious of, why am I collecting all these things? But I find myself metaphorically pulling them down all the time. And then when you get to share them and you get to like ignite someone else going down the rabbit hole, I'm like, oh, this was so worth it. All that time I spent on this thing was worth it for that moment. Do you think that feeds into this drive that you've had to bring people together? Because it's a great place to get to share this thing that you're naturally accumulating.

Anamaria Dorgo: I don't know if it was first that and then community or if it was first community and then that. I wasn't like this. I think the, the piece of me, the, the curiosity, the learning by doing, the exposing myself to things I haven't done, things that are hard, just like learning, almost like accumulating as an experience like you would hunt Pokemons, you know. All my life I, I've done that. Even from an early age, throughout school, throughout university. This collecting things and then community, I think it came quite later. With me, I think it started with...

Anamaria Dorgo: ...sharing on LinkedIn. I was working in the same organization for quite a few years and decided to move to the Netherlands back then. And I struggled a lot to find a job. My CV was looking great. I had leadership experience, I was managing big budget, I was managing HR operations across different regions and countries. And I really struggled to find a job. It took me a while. I also had a particular type of role in mind, but I realized in that whole process and after getting out and finally finding a job, I realized wow, I am not known. I don't have a network. I've been in my shell. The org I was working in was all I knew. And the moment I left I said I'm gonna build something for myself, something that is mine, that I can look back into, that it's not linked to a role or a job or an organization or anything like that.

And I didn't had a big strategy or a big plan in mind, but I started, again, in my learning. I was reading a book, I was taking notes, three notes I would put on LinkedIn: "I read this book, these are three ideas that stick with me." I was taking a course, I was going to a workshop or whatever, I would take photos: "This is where I'm at, this is what I'm learning, this is what I'm doing." So I think it started a bit with maybe documenting my learning process, or if you like, learning out loud, etc. My LinkedIn was really small. There was no engagement. I didn't care. It was like whatever. I loved, I remember going back to my feed and be like, all right, a month ago I was doing this thing, and I would reread my notes. So pretty much like a journal.

Mike Courian: And also like quite a high-stakes journal, because when you publish something I feel like you have to... no, but in a great way, because it takes it from the messy notes that are everywhere into like, no, this was a moment where I paused and solidified really what I was feeling and thinking. And I feel like it's like the next step. There's the initial receiving of an idea, and...

Mike Courian: Like, there's the initial reaction that's captured in your notes, but I feel like that next step is so crucial to solidifying it as like a formed thing in your mind. So I think it makes so much sense that you started doing that. I wish I actually did that more.

Anamaria Dorgo: Yeah, I think for me at the beginning, because I sometimes talk about LinkedIn to other people, they're like, "I don't know what to post." I'm like, first, it's daunting, right? But it doesn't have to be something original. It doesn't have to be something you thought about. You can just curate. You can just say, "This is how I see this thing." And so that feels a bit less, 'cause it doesn't come from you. And I think after a while that you start writing and you start reading and collecting, then you start to see ideas cross, and suddenly it's like, oh, a new idea or insight is forming. It's not immediately taken from someone, it's taken from six different places and you suddenly see something that wasn't present before. So then after a while, it took me maybe a year, maybe more than that, to start actually sharing own thoughts, and that was okay. But yeah, it was a very organic process.

And then came community building. Then I started L&D Shakers. And then they merged so well. And I say this a lot when people ask me, "So how do you build a community or how do you build a following or how do you build LinkedIn?" or whatever. And I always say, "Do cool stuff, talk about cool stuff." Like, that's the secret. There's no... you need to have something to talk about. So when I started L&D Shakers, there was so much to talk about. There were so many things I was learning. Like, this exposure to the industry was massive. And I remember leaving every meetup with notes and with, like, 20 tabs open of tools and orgs and insights and articles and whatever. And I was like, oh my god, this is better than my master's. I was like, I would trade my two years master's degree with two years of leading a community of practice and I would be smarter. I would be better off at the end of it. So how wild is that?

Mike Courian: That's so cool. So that feels like a great little whistle-stop tour of how you found your way from, I'll call it, before your life of community...

Mike Courian: Building into the beginning of it, and we're going to dive a lot more into it. Before we do, though, I'm curious for those that hear that word and don't know what you mean. Do you have, like, a simple definition that you give to a community, and do you use it interchangeably with community of practice, or do you mean different things by that? So we'll start with your definition of community, and then we can flesh things out.

Anamaria Dorgo: I think because I'm so into communities of practice, sometimes in my head I'm very, like, I mix the two. There are different types of communities. So if I were to broaden that, I think community of practice, because it's so much into learning, you improve a craft, you want to get better at something together with other people, and that's the practice piece, and the community piece is with other people.

But if I were to expand that definition, community in general beyond learning, it can just be, this is my neighborhood community, or this is the community of dog walkers in my city, or whatever it is. I think it's a group of people that share something, a commonality, there's a red thread there that can be a shared passion, it can be a shared interest, it can be a shared life experience, whether positive or negative, that brings them together. It can be job, location. So they have, there's a shared something, at least one element that's important to them.

And that element, whatever it is, is the reason they come together, and the coming together, the grouping, meets a need or serves a need that they have. And that need is again different. It can be the need to expand, the need to belong, the need to make sense, the need to be soothed, the need to feel seen, the need to, et cetera. So if I were to make it really broad, that's how I would describe it.

Mike Courian: And if you were to paint a little picture for us of your most common scenario of a community of practice, possibly in a corporate setting or outside of, what does the most common form of it look like right now for you?

Anamaria Dorgo: Usually it starts quite small. One, two...

Anamaria Dorgo: Two, three people, very organically, while you talk about the domain, in this case, or in my case, the domain is L&D, learning and development, that's the industry, that's our domain. And we come together organically, and then you start talking about that. And in that conversation, you realize, oh, we have shared challenges, or we have shared blockers or ideas. And there's an exchange of value being produced, even on a one-on-one level.

So you're like, oh, Mike was so cool. He actually pointed out to something. He maybe shared a link. I shared that I'm re-designing my leadership, he actually gave me two tips. So this was time well spent. I took something, but also in that conversation, I saw Mike nod every now and then, so I know that I have stuff to offer to Mike. So there's some, even if it's very subtle and often quite, probably not even conscious, there's that feel-good is, I took something of value, but I also am useful to this other person. And then it's usually, oh, let's do this again. Who else do we need to bring and so on.

So that's when it starts very organically. And after a while, you start to... as the group grows, you start to define a little bit, oh, who is this for? And who is it not? And actually, what is the learning agenda? Like, what are we doing together? What are we improving? And how do we do that? What formats and ways of gathering and coming together do we need in order to get to that goal or... I call this often the transformation. What's the transformation that we're going through?

If we build a community of practice and I'm coming and behaving and showing up as I should in an ideal way, how will I be transformed and how will we be transformed in a year from now, or in two, or in three? So that's the goal, the transformation, the change. And it's usually I am better at something. In a community of practice, one of the main motivators is I want to get better at my practice. And that means resources, ideas, exchanges, case studies, shortcuts, inspiration, whatever it means, I have a place that feeds...

Anamaria Dorgo: ...me intellectually, where I feel like I'm actually becoming a better L&D in that case. And then it can grow as big or stay as small as the group decides. With L&D Shakers, we've built an ecosystem. In an organization, I had Andrew in my podcast and he is building a learning community. He is working in tech engineering and he's like, "What I'm doing is I am bringing my colleagues together on a regular basis, every, I think it was every week or every month, and it's just we come together in a Zoom call and we learn out loud. I share my screen, I actually tell them, this is what I've done this week, this is how I wrote this code, this is how I fixed this bug, this is how I whatever. How have you?" And then the other person shares their screen. So it's like very, there's no slides and there's no preparation and there's no speakers and there's no... and that's his community of practice. They're all getting better at the stuff they have to do every day when they sit at their desk.

In L&D Shakers, on the other side, we have a massive core team. 70 people driving it forward. There's events offline, online, there's a podcast, there's free coaching, there's mentoring, there's a wiki library, there's learning clusters, there's so many things. It's like an ecosystem. And they're both communities of practice, because it's for someone, we speak the same language, we come together, we give and we take, and we get better at what we do every day. And they're both amazing, both options. And you can have everything in between, you know, from little small to really big.

Mike Courian: And is there a number that you, like if you were giving me an explanation of L&D Shakers, how many people would you say are a part of it now, roughly?

Anamaria Dorgo: Because it's a free community, and because we are both in a LinkedIn group and in Slack, and there's people in both and there's people in some, I'm gonna just give you like general numbers. So in the LinkedIn group, we are over 8,000 people. 8,500 maybe. In Slack we have over 4,000 people. And then we also have a LinkedIn following, this is our LinkedIn company page, where we promote all the events, and we have 25,000 followers...

Anamaria Dorgo: So obviously they're not all in the community, that means that they cannot talk back, but if they want to work with the coach, work with the mentor, listen to the podcast, read the newsletter, attend events, they can do that without having to be in the LinkedIn group or inside the Slack channel.

So that's really the forum where you can ask a question and you can just interact without being called for interaction, whereas on the LinkedIn group you're being called to something and then you answer the call, right?

So yeah, it's pretty big and also because it's free and people are sharing it's like, I really don't care. Like, I don't think that the core team and so on, I don't think we really care about that, the numbers. But it's big and it's all over the world. That's for me the wildest piece, I think. The fact that people are joining us from all the corners of the world. That's wild.

Mike Courian: Yeah, it's so cool. I didn't think there was any ego attached to it and that wasn't actually why I asked. Why I asked is because I love how you are going to take us on a journey through this conversation that is you spanning two or three people all the way up to thousands. And so somehow this thing that we're talking about is dynamic enough to hold those both in tension. And obviously, at the core of all this, it's conversation and it's being with one another.

And so a thousand people can't really directly be with one another, but that doesn't mean it's not the incubation of all sorts of other things spinning out of that larger pool of people. And again, the funny thing is when you put the call out and there's some sort of event or meetup or whatever, it's never gonna be everybody. It's always just a handful, a pocket of the group, and then that people get to share in it. It's so cool.

What I'm curious about is, you're obviously biased, you're a huge fan, I don't have to win you over on the idea. I would say I am too, although it's a newer expression for me, but do you have like an elevator pitch to the skeptic

Mike Courian: ...as to why join a community. Why do you believe in them so much?

Anamaria Dorgo: I don't have an elevator pitch, so I'm definitely going to have one after that. So sorry if this is probably going to be a bit long-winded as I think while I talk.

Mike Courian: It's okay. It's a thousand-story building, so the elevator actually takes quite a while, so you can take as long as you want.

Anamaria Dorgo: It's the longest building in the world! It's interesting because if I can only look at my experience and the experience of other people that are particularly, like, very actively engaged. And if I look back at my experience, that the motivation of why you should join, it changed in these six years of being part of L&D Shakers.

So different things will speak to different people. To me initially, it's shortcuts to solutions and access to smart people. Exposure to different ideas, fresh perspectives outside of your bubble, whether that's your organization or the fact that you live in the Netherlands or the fact that you've only worked in retail so far, etc. So you get exposure to other viewpoints. You make friends. You sit around a table with people that speak the same language and they care about the stuff that you ask or the thing that you're inquiring about. They care about that and they will take their time with love and care to answer and make sense and support.

And also the third thing, besides like access and the fact that there is true—these are my people, this is my crowd. The third piece I'd say, not everyone makes use of communities like that. I call it like a personal learning playground, because there's no stakes in a community of practice. Meaning you do not have a strategy, you don't have budgets, you don't have managers to answer to. You don't have quarters and closing of the years and all of those things that we know from our day-to-day jobs and deliverables. And so it's not serious in that sense, it's very serious on a...

Anamaria Dorgo: personal sense. So if you want to try something, if you want to do something for the first time and feel held by the space and by the people and feel safe to experiment or ask a question. If you want to roll up your sleeves and say, I'm actually gonna start a project here and I'm gonna lead that because I'm looking to flex X, Y, Z skills. And maybe my day-to-day doesn't allow that because I have to be in the known and in my performance mode. So a community is, it's the learning mode, it's the failing mode, it's the I don't know mode, it's the I'm curious, it's the I'm starting something, maybe this doesn't go anywhere, and that's fine. And that makes it so appealing to me personally and to many other people that spend a lot of time in communities. So the longest winded elevator pitch, but I think, yeah, I see three different things maybe as main benefits.

Mike Courian: One of the things you had me thinking about as you shared that, was we definitely now live in a cultural moment where it's very easy to not be part of communities. I was imagining if somebody time traveled and was listening to us, they're going, what are you talking about? Like, isn't this just living? And we're like, well, no, this doesn't naturally happen. It does need to be intentionally formed and sought out. But I think at another level, we're also talking about something different which would have existed the whole time, which is specialty. And so meeting up with your geographical neighbor doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be amazing at solving your technical challenge. So I was just reflecting on how it is funny that we have to intentionally do this, but also maybe there's an element where we always have needed to intentionally form communities like this.

Anamaria Dorgo: I do believe that right now we all at the same time form part of different communities. So for work, for inspiration, you might go somewhere and then it's like, okay, my friends are my friends

Anamaria Dorgo: ...and that's my other community and then my neighbors and the fact that we sometimes grill in the whatever in front of our house twice a year. It's like it's a different flavor of community and coming together. So if I'm religious, I'm going to church, there's something else. So there's if I'm going to the same gym every single, you know, week, I'm forming a community there and it's all about creatine and protein and all that. But if I work as an engineer, then I might go somewhere else to talk about code and AI and architecture and all of that. So yeah, we scratch different itches with different communities that we're part of and different needs that we have. But I do think that in terms of that proximity and the communal living or the communal way of being, and I grew up in a Romanian village and my parents still live there, and there is a difference in how things have changed and nothing else has changed. The village is the same and, you know, the people, yeah, they're older, but it's you sense a disconnection more than it used to be.

Mike Courian: And I just love that this work you're doing will have maybe intentional or unintentional ripples to help us go back to those great ways of being with one another. And so I love, I love that aspect of the work you're doing.

Anamaria Dorgo: When you said then now the word ripples, it made me think yesterday, Vesna, who is part of L&D Shakers and part of a little experiment that I have going on, she wrote me a message and she was like, "You know that LinkedIn has now this LinkedIn wrapped, and I think it tells you the person that you were most connected with." So she's like, "You're the person," she sent me a screenshot, she's like, "You're the person I was most connected with this year. And so I learned so much from you." And it was really kind and beautiful. And then I said, "Oh, let's keep it up next year." And then she wrote back and she said, "I don't know if you realize that the conversation..." So she works in a totally different, she works in farming and agriculture and a totally different thing, like totally different worlds, but she's a lifelong learner and avid passionate of learning and sensemaking.

Anamaria Dorgo: That's why she's in L&D Shakers. And she said, I don't know if you realize that the work you're doing is having ripples of impact in the farmers and agriculture community and the way we come together to solve the challenges that we have in our field. And it was so emotional... I'm getting goosebumps now. It was so emotional when I read that message. Of course I don't know. Of course I didn't... it hasn't even crossed my mind. No, I don't know that. So to see her say that, it really, yeah, brings me back to this, oh man, it's a lot of work from a lot of people, but it's so damn worth it. Because you don't know where that ripple goes and how far they expand in people's lives and work and so on. So...

Mike Courian: And isn't the beautiful thing that probably, I don't know what the percentage is, let's say 75% of my life, I won't even ever find out. The ripples still went out. And that's just the wonderful thing of living this open life. Because a huge part of everything you're describing is an openness and a... I want to call it sharing. But it's just like sharing sounds like kids in kindergarten, but...

Anamaria Dorgo: Sharing, it's enabling, yeah. It is, it is opening, yeah.

Mike Courian: But it's really, um, I don't know, it's cool. And, and I just think when people do that, when humans do that, it does. It sends out these ripples. So good on you. I'm so glad you're getting that kind of feedback. Because I think you need that kind of feedback every so often. Because it really touches on the like, I mean, if you're talking about sense-making and meaning-making, you're like, whoa, okay. There's real purpose behind this stuff. It's not just fun. Yeah.

Anamaria Dorgo: That's the meaning piece. And don't get me wrong, community work is hard work. I think just the other day as we were onboarding and opening new local hubs, so local hubs are in L&D Shakers offline communities in different cities. So they bring people together offline once a month in their city. So every time I onboard a new crew in a different city, I will always try to persuade them not to do it first.

Anamaria Dorgo: I was always painting this picture of it's hard work, you're adding stuff onto your to-do list, you are gonna work weekends, you're sometimes gonna work evenings. Uh, you know, you have kids, you have family, you've got work, you've got life. Are you sure you want to add something extra? Because this is what's coming your way. And if they're still excited through that, and they want to give it a go, then they're gonna do amazing. But very often I try to actually steer people away from it because it's a lot of work. And you're not always aware of the impact, you don't always see it. So when someone takes those five minutes every now and then to drop that little one sentence back, it means the world. And it's no exaggeration, like the boost of energy, the meaning, that it's all worth it, this is why we're doing this. It's just because yeah, it's sometimes the ripple and we can talk about the values and all of that. It's a very tricky thing. It's quite hard to capture, it's not as easy to capture the ROI of coming together and learning and growing in community. It's mainly in these stories that people share of impact. So yeah, it was a good day yesterday when Vesna shared that.

Mike Courian: That's so cool. Let's dive a little bit more into, because we could have this conversation and it would paint this rosy glowing picture of people coming together. But the reality, and we actually started with this, the reality of learning is jagged-edged, hard, disappointing... unknown is probably one of the better words. Uncharted. And so I'd love for you to list out, like if you did a rapid fire of like, when you're saying it's hard, what are some of those things that you're like, "Yep, I've been doing this for a long time and it's hard and these are the reasons why it's hard."

Anamaria Dorgo: The maybe the first thing that comes to mind is you need to invest. It's a big investment of energy, time, brain power, coming up with...

Anamaria Dorgo: Things holding that space and sometimes, often at the start, it doesn't seem like it's working because probably five people will show up or 10 people will show up. And somehow we are conditioned in believing that it has to be big and it has to be, if it's five people it's not as important as if it's 50. And that's wrong because if it's 50 people and everyone leaves with the impression that it was a waste of time, the value it holds is in the experience. If there's five people and everyone leaves and says, "My God, that was the best hour of this week. I love that. When's the next one? I'm gonna come back." Then that's, that's what you want, that's the value.

So I think you need to nourish it a lot and put a lot of love and consistency.

Mike Courian: Yeah.

Anamaria Dorgo: We struggle with consistency because we have other obligations in life where we need to be consistent, like with partners and families and friends and work. So that's the hard piece.

The maybe not seeing an immediate impact, like a, that echo back. So it's more like a ripple that goes out and doesn't come back and less like an echo that you hear immediately. So we're also conditioned to be like, "What's the impact? What does this bring, et cetera, immediately? Otherwise I'm gonna move on and put my energy somewhere else." You need to be patient with communities before you see the ripples.

And we get so much stuck, we try to make it perfect, I guess, maybe that's what I'm trying to say. A lot of people are like, "I don't know how to do it." And then you're over-engineering it and you're thinking a lot. And the more you over-engineer it, the less it works, because it's just like...

Mike Courian: Yeah, it's like you stifle it.

Anamaria Dorgo: Yes, it's more like, I don't know, it needs to flow. Just start somewhere, poke somewhere, see what happens, pull a thread, see where it takes you. You don't need to have the answers as a community starter or steward or core team. You don't have to have the answers to everything, because if you do have the answer, that's not, that's not good for the long-term. I always tell people you're not there to offer a service, unless it's a community that people pay for, so that we could, we could talk about that, that's another thing. Uh, there's those...

Anamaria Dorgo: communities too, but if it's truly this co-created space, you don't want people to look at you as, give me something, you're the person creating, and so if you're gone or if you're not speaking, no one takes anything. And it's like, the goal is for the conversations, the learning, and the impact to be as rich, if not richer, when you're not in the room. That's the purpose, and have different people contribute to that pot of insights and goodness. And the list goes on, but I think those are the three main challenges that I see with people. Time. It's, it's hard. You know, it's work. You don't see the impact straight away. And also, we overthink it. We overthink it, and then we make our lives harder.

Mike Courian: Time was just this thing that I, that I wrote down. It was the word I had on my notes, because I just was thinking about how we've, we squeeze a lot into our lives now, and we're able to squeeze more in because of things being more efficient, or, you know, you can order it online and pick it up later, and all these hacks to fit more in. But I have to imagine that a group's only going to really take hold and flourish when there is that nurtured time given. And there's no other way to do it, other than the minutes and the hours. Like, yeah, you can't, you can't hack that. And so, is it just that you have to prioritize it and make sacrifices in other areas? Because I was gonna say, I don't really see there being any other trick to how people can begin to both form a community or join a community and meaningfully participate otherwise.

Anamaria Dorgo: I have not found another. I haven't found it. So it's very boring, it's actually not very glamorous when someone asks, to be honest, because you need to put in the reps. And so I always, sometimes when I consult and when people come for advice and we talk, I always ask, why are you really, really doing this? Why do you really, really want to start this? You need to be so damn personally passionate about this, like you have to love it.

Anamaria Dorgo: In the sense of if no one comes, I will still spend my time doing this. No matter if I'm alone or if there's a hundred people with me. What is that one thing that feels like that? Because it's gonna be like that.

So that's why when people are like, oh I want to make profit, I want to do this, I want to do that, I'm like, do you madly deeply love this thing? Because it's gonna take a year or two to reap any rewards. So it's a long, it's a long game. And so if you don't burn with passion, you're gonna give up before you start seeing any benefits.

And sometimes it's, you just feel, I don't know, you can't pinpoint it. You just, you just feel it. You have that passion. And so people feel that when you're in a room and you talk about the craft and you talk about, in my case L&D or learning or community building, is people feel whether you love this, whether this is the real deal, and they resonate like on an emotional level.

And if it's, if it's not something you are deeply passionate about, people will feel that too. And so they're not gonna, there's not gonna be the energy, invisible energy pull to be like, oh my god, I almost feel this woman's passion and it touched something in me and it's so energizing. I don't know what it is, and it happens very unconsciously. So that's what brings people together, that's the infectious bit.

And so you have a few people and then you find more and more infectious people and you start, it's like a disease. It spreads like that, but there's no other trick. There really isn't. You need to love it because you have to put in the work, and if you don't love it, you can't put in the work. You're gonna resent it and it's not gonna work.

Mike Courian: Yes. Yes. I think you're spot on. Authenticity only. Because otherwise, otherwise it's not going to last. For organizational L&D leaders that have identified that the value and the return on the time invested...

Mike Courian: Into forming a community or a community building culture of learning within an organization, do you have tips, like starting go-to things that you give them to like effectively start the process? Where should people start and what should they focus on?

Anamaria Dorgo: So I mean a bit in that process now in my new role at Agenda, look into that, but also with my clients as I consult. The best, the easiest, smoothest, more natural way is to always find the pockets of connection and sharing that are inevitably happening, happening in the organization. There are people who by nature are collaborative and curious and starters, like they like to start things and be proactive. So I would first look for those, who is meeting when or is someone leading something, is someone doing something. If you can't find that and you want to almost like nudge it a little bit, there's a lot of relationship building.

I'd look at the culture. If you have a culture that favors intra, almost like intrapreneurship type of start something, you don't need permission, own projects, experiment. Well, chances are that communities are already happening when you have that culture. So you just have to find them and enable or support them, see what they need to make them bigger or more impactful.

If the culture is not that, then the only way that I can think of you could start this is you need to find someone in the higher leadership levels that believes in collective intelligence or like I wouldn't even call it learning. I would probably use the word collaboration because that's what they use when they talk about groups of people coming together. So collaboration or breaking down silos. And I would see what is the main pain point that the business has or that this team lead has in their department, in their function, and could the community be...

Anamaria Dorgo: Plugged in as one of the potential solutions. So do they struggle with, I don't know, quality of hires? They're like, oh yeah, very junior people, we need to whatever, and we have very few experts. So how do we upskill? That's a great way to do through communities of practice. Things like breaking down silos or like similar bars across different offices and teams, some are like very high performing and the others are like struggling. That's for me language that makes me plug a community of practice as a potential solution.

Mike Courian: Would you be recommending to an L&D leader to invest in a community of practice over and above a tool or a content library? Like is that like an active decision you'd be pushing people towards in terms of where they deploy their resource and time? It's always contextual, I know, but...

Anamaria Dorgo: Yes. Yes. I, if the, depends on the purposes, but if it's knowledge sharing and collaboration and so on, from what I've seen in my work, the coming together comes first and then comes the fact that people see value in documenting or in sharing or in capturing things somewhere. Unless I find out that in engineering you have this culture of documentation and you have the culture of continuous improvement. So I think by nature that their craft is very much like that. That's the rituals that they have as teams. So they do that more naturally.

Anamaria Dorgo: But beyond engineering and different other teams, we don't have this culture of continuous improvement and documentation and practice and making sure that you go back. And you need to have the tool because the tool enables, right? If you don't have the tool and if you don't have a place to document or a way to tag or like a common approach to documentation across the org, it's gonna get hard, you're not gonna be able to do it. People need to download their brains or their work somewhere. But I don't think that comes first. So first, bring the people together and naturally they will ask you, well, where can we document stuff? So do we have a tool?

Anamaria Dorgo: They're going to ask for that eventually. And then the forum or whatever, I don't think putting people in a forum somewhere, I don't, that's not, I've never seen that work unless it's Reddit, right? But like internally in an organization, I haven't seen like, "This is a forum. Here are our 700 sales teams, and now, share. Ask questions and share." Nothing happens. The people need to come together, the people need to see each other, smile at each other, and nod and take notes and be like, "Oh, I took something, this was really cool, this was useful." And then as a result of that connection, potentially the forum will start in time, because now I can just say, "Yo Mike, remember that we talked about last time about this thing and thing? This was the word that combines extrovert and introvert, and this is the article, so that's what I will put in the forum, for example."

Mike Courian: It's so interesting how that connection and relationship is essential to the whole thing working. You know, the absence of it, like you said, the sterile, clinical forum, without that relationship, there's just not that drive, is there?

Anamaria Dorgo: People connect anyway. They connect with their teams. So they connect with their teams, or they do have people at work. That connection is inevitable. Emily Weber says this, "People need to bump heads." So I use this a lot. I just talked about this in my pod. In community you need to bump heads with people. You need to like, 'cause that's where the magic happens. And people are bumping heads as they work, as they collaborate cross-functional and so on. Community just takes that and expands it to other teams and other regions and other offices, and to bring in the richness into the conversation. But yeah, connection I find that it happens, we're humans, we don't have to seed it, but if you wanna work at scale and be a bit more intentional, it needs a supporting, enabling culture more than anything else. Permission, culture.

Mike Courian: Yeah. Have you ever seen it done successfully in an organization that would almost have...

Mike Courian: Quite a, you described like a culture that has a lot of intrapreneurship and things like that. Have you ever seen it work and take place in a culture that's kind of the opposite of that? I don't know what the opposite, I don't know how to describe that, but I think we all know what we're talking about. You might call it traditional and very rigid, let's say those are the, that is the organization somebody finds themself in. Have you ever seen an example of it working in those circumstances? Even though it seems like an adverse place.

Anamaria Dorgo: I don't have an example of that I can say, oh yes, this company comes to mind. And traditional organizations, maybe yes, they're very complex, but still there's this underlying belief that people have that they are allowed to start something.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Anamaria Dorgo: So when the culture has this, we're not allowed, the things I'm sharing, the things I'm posting, I'm constantly under scrutiny by my manager, like generally you feel there's no psychological safety basically. You're like, I'm constantly judged here. It's very hard for that to happen at scale. Unless the people that land there, like there is someone that has seen it somewhere else, and they're like, I'm gonna try to... and I get this question a lot. Anamaria, I work... I got it from other people. I work in this stiff culture and there's very like hierarchical and very old-fashioned. How do I bring this in? People don't know it, I find that it wouldn't be well received. I say this, you have to Trojan horse it or someone in the conversation that I remember, people, as they said, yeah, you can also Trojan mouse it. It doesn't have to be a horse, it can also be like something really, really tiny. So how do you bring it or attach community or collective on top of something that already exists? For example, every organization has leadership development programs, and they're usually, I don't know, days together and some e-learning or whatever. In best cases, yes, some workshops or I don't know. What if you take and say, part of the leadership program is we have the week...

Anamaria Dorgo: Learning in the classroom where there are slides and experts and the leaders are learning. And afterwards, we're going to divide them in groups of five and put them in a group somewhere and bring them together to make sense of that learning and bring challenges, discuss challenges that they're facing when they take the knowledge from the program and apply it to their day-to-day. They're going to run into troubles, where are they going? So that you might sell it like that to someone and get that seal of approval if you need that internally by not calling it a community and just attaching it to something that's already there and making it more effective. Linking it to transfer, linking it to support, engagement. I know that a lot of organizations have culture and engagement surveys, so where can you link it to something that your top leaders are already looking at and nodding and accepting it as something that's okay to exist? And just don't call it a community. That's fine. You can call it something else. So Trojan horse it or Trojan mice it into the space. Don't tell anyone.

Mike Courian: I love that. I love the Trojan mice. And I love the idea of connecting it to an existing priority, and that being the way in. And using that language, we don't need to create new language, because that's part of the little mice sneaking its way in. And so that, I think that's really strategic, and I think that's a great tip.

Now, if we were looking towards the communities that you're a part of right now that you think are the richest places for you personally, what do you think are some of the elements that keep a community strong and thriving? Are there any structures or anything specific that you think is really working for your most valuable communities at the moment?

Anamaria Dorgo: Something I see is this consistency and commitment to creating value.

Anamaria Dorgo: It matters less who is it, it can be two or three people, it can be 70 people. People might change, it doesn't matter, as long as there's, what matters to these people? What is top of mind, what are their challenges, what are they working on? And how do we turn those questions into conversations or programs or projects or activities that are useful to them. So a lot of intentionality, consistency over time, and focus on value.

The communities for me that resist the test of time, so I'm thinking almost like a sustainable community over time that doesn't burn out its people, you need to divide the load. So you need to work with some form of a core team, founders team, etc., community members that take ownership and contribute and create.

And something that I see time and again, particularly because I'm a lot of, like I'm a lot of, I'm part of a lot of communities of learning or practice, is the, the practice bit. People are tired of sages on the stage, people are tired of the webinar, people are tired of an hour someone talking on top of 60 slides. They wanna push that aside. And there's so much of that, so if you want that you're gonna find it.

What people are hungry to find is spaces where there's round tables, where there's sense-making. We're all experts at something today and a newbie at something else tomorrow. How are you doing it? I remember at the beginning of L&D Shakers when we started with Monique Suran who was working at WeTransfer, she constantly said this, she was constantly saying, like, "I wanna see your dirty kitchen, I don't care about your polished slides. Open the cupboards, where is the dust? Where are the things?"

So this almost like, give me the realness of the things, not the polished "these are the slides." What didn't work? What was hard? How have you convinced someone that did not believe in that?

Anamaria Dorgo: What did she have to drop? What was heartbreaking? So these real practitioner case studies or examples, and then people on top of that look for inspiration. How are you doing it? What are the new tools and new models, an article you read, who's spicing things up, who's doing things differently? And maybe that's just me in my bubble of L&D, where everyone's just like looking to disrupt, but I think in communities, if I look beyond even in communities for community builders, there's this, how do we challenge the status quo? How do we push forward? How do we change things? So those would be a few elements, I think of structure and of flavor maybe or culture. And one last thing that I would add is, document. You can't go out and work with a core team or create a movement and have volunteers and different members do things if you have not documented the steps or the thing. So make it easy for yourself, document everything and just like give people that pack, make it a package, give it make it easy for them to contribute and pick something up so they don't have to figure it out. So yeah, I think those would be a few things that come to mind.

Mike Courian: Those are great. I was wondering, do you have any best practice for creating an equal opportunity for people sharing? Let's say the group's getting a bit larger and it's synchronous, it's a conversation. Yeah, how do you manage that? And do you have protocols for any of your groups on how to create an equal space and an opportunity for people to share?

Anamaria Dorgo: It's probably one of the biggest growing pains. To see a community growing and thousands of people, it's at the expense of that. So that's the trade-off. In L&D Shakers, as we grew and a lot of the core team members that are coming, "Anamaria, tell us what these people", and we do have what do they need and we have we run surveys and things like that. So we have data. It's just very hard to put out an event in front of or any type of...

Anamaria Dorgo: Project in front of 8,000 people and expect that the ones that will participate from all over the world, different backgrounds, they're all gonna find the equal amount of value in that. That's just impossible. It's futile. They're never gonna get there.

So we went like two ways. The one where we've gone on that journey so far is to work with creating a menu or an ecosystem, almost like if you go to the restaurant and you pick the menus. Like, how much time do you have? Do you want to just grab some olives and some bread and then off you go? Do you have a lot of time? Do you want a five-course menu? Do you want to go really deep? Do you want small group? Do you want big group? Do you want one-on-one? What do you need? So aiming really to create a rich menu or ecosystem for people to go and point and choose based on what they need in this moment. Do you want to work async? You can't be doing things synchronously for whatever... Yeah, so we tackle that that way.

But when it comes to actual connection and people coming together in meaningful ways synchronously, you lose that. One of the things that's constantly on my wish list for L&D Shakers is some format, some sort of a initiative that almost like create your own circle of advisors. So how would we help facilitate 8,000 people, those who want, not everyone wants to, but those who want, how do we facilitate them finding a group of five other practitioners that are somewhat similar in terms of where they're at, or completely different because they want to expose themselves and be challenged? You can go both ways, and there's value in both.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Anamaria Dorgo: How do we a, enable the matching? I don't have the answer to that. And then how do we enable a minimum self-facilitated structure? And obviously, in my case, there's privilege because we work in learning, so we're all somewhat aware of facilitating and we can self-facilitate, but...

Anamaria Dorgo: If you're building a community of practice for... around a practice that isn't by nature like that, then you need to offer a one-pager structure of when you meet once a month with your trusted circle. Here's how you can spend the 10 minutes, the first 10 minutes, and then, and then, this is how you close, right? So a self-facilitated way of doing that. And that's hard. I've been trying to loosely pitch that to different people in L&D Shakers. We don't have that project yet. I believe it will add tremendous value because you lose that.

What we see happening right now is because we have, there's a lot of that stronger connection because we have free coaching and free mentoring, and people create their own... like, they create their journey for themselves. They have strong connections to their coach or their mentor. That's one, one-to-one. Or also, if they come together to lead a project, so that's mainly in the core team, the work brings them together. It's the collab... you need to come together constantly to solve something, to fix something in order to create that connection to the person.

In that case, I do see those people forming those connections and be like, "Ah, it's my tribe." But amongst 8,000 people, you need intentionality. So, we're not there yet, but that's what... that's what I would answer and that's what I would recommend someone that has a big community. You need to create smaller communities. And we do that a little bit with... we call these the learning clusters. And a cluster is everything. It can be anything. We have a cluster that is called the Maker Space that's led by a group of Shakers.

And what they're doing is if you want... if you're just new to L&D and you don't have work to show, or if you want to pivot into L&D and you want to have work to show, you come here and we create things. So that's just 200 people in the big community and they're doing their thing. We have a cluster around instructional design. So in the big L&D umbrella, instructional designers come to talk about their craft. So that's a smaller community in the small community. But yeah, I would go even smaller. So to a group of five or six people that...

Anamaria Dorgo: ...you meet once a month. That would be magic.

Mike Courian: Yeah. Yeah, it's so cool. It does feel like that coordination is tricky, and it does feel like a place where some clever, unintrusive technology could be helpful.

Anamaria Dorgo: Yes.

Mike Courian: So when you find it, let me know, because I think that that will be, that will be of real value to supporting... It's funny, there's a hunger to be together, but we don't... I don't know who my five should be, I don't know how to form it, I just need a little bit of assistance. And it's funny how that little bit of assistance will all of a sudden create all these things happening. So I agree with it, I really do agree with you that it seems like a real opportunity there.

Anamaria Dorgo: Yeah. Sometimes I'm like, how prescriptive do we have to be? I had a little learning class like that, I remember. It's like, the community is there, you can just be like, "Hey guys, I'm exploring XYZ topics, I'm looking for five other people that explore XYZ topics. And the purpose is to start, and we're gonna commit to meeting once a month for six months and then we'll see." Also, you don't have to commit for life to that little group, you know, and you can dismantle once the purpose has been served. Do people feel like they need permission? Like, yeah, so the community is there, but sometimes, do we have to be prescriptive? Do we have to create that? Why is it not emerging by itself? So yeah, there's so many questions going through my mind.

Mike Courian: Yeah. I mean, that's great. That question of why is it not emerging, because you could say like, "Oh, this is simple, we don't need to be, we don't need to be involved in this." But at the same time, why is it not happening? And I had a conversation with a woman, she works for Growth Faculty in Australia, her name's Barbara Harvey. And Barbara was describing the easiest—it's almost a straw man argument—but the easiest example is: allow adults to have a gym membership, how many people go? And she's just like, "Yes, we are adults, and yes, we could self-organize." But it is amazing how with a little bit more scaffolding and structure you create...

Mike Courian: A net that more people find themselves sort of finding their way into making more things happen. And, and more engagement. And so it is interesting. It's a delicate balance and maybe it's, maybe it's a byproduct of—I'm not gonna blame individualism for everything, but maybe it is a byproduct of individualism is that we're kind of like, "Ah, yeah, everybody will sort it out." And it's kind of like, no, actually, I needed a little bit more of a nudge. I needed it to be scaffolded just a little bit more. So I think there's something interesting there.

Anamaria Dorgo: So there's, it, it is interesting because as I hear you talking, I'm thinking, yes. Also, I foresee a potential... maybe, maybe the word is not friction, but I know that when things are easy and you're like, "All you have to do is drop your email here, it's so easy, you're gonna be matched with five people and then off you go," that ease is gonna attract a lot of people. And you still have to put in the work to keep the group going. So I almost find it's gonna be so easy to have them, group them, and have the groups actually die after a month because no one is there. Why? Because there was no friction, there was no work that they had to do to create the group, to find the group. It was as easy as like, "Of course I want to be paired with five other people through an email." But then you don't think about the fact, do I have the capacity? Do I have the bandwidth? This means that I have to meet once a month. This means that I probably have to commit into doing some work in between the months. Whatever. Like, what's the purpose of this and what am I saying yes to? So I find that when it's so easy, we say yes to 200 things and obviously you can't do 200 things, and you definitely can't do them well.

Mike Courian: And do you know what? I actually had the privilege of speaking with Bev and Etienne Wenger-Trayner, and they were talking about this phenomenon of how cells have to divide. It's just human biology. It's how we live. And yet, when they divide too much, that actually becomes called cancer.

Mike Courian: And it's a sickness. And so there's this interesting thing where something that can serve a flourishing community of practice can also be this Achilles heel for it or this sickness within it. And I, that's not exactly what we were talking about, but I just, I can see the synergy because, like you said, if it's too easy, it's the same reason why you don't give things away for free, because you find that there's just a very low level of engagement. And, and I guess making it too easy for those clusters of five people to form inevitably leads to that lethargy. That, that just like, yeah, it, and so it's so counterintuitive because everybody's like, no, I just need a little help. And you're like, I know you think that, but actually I think I need to make it a little bit harder because that's actually what's gonna make the difference.

Anamaria Dorgo: I think that's one of the things, and or an Achilles heel as you say. I also think engagement is an Achilles heel. Everyone wants engagement in community and we all struggle to create engagement or foster engagement. I can tell you that in L&D Shakers at certain moments, we have too much and it's overwhelming. So there's a fine balance in between how much is too much so that people perceive it as overwhelming or noisy, and what's the sweet spot. Because when there's not a lot of conversation, it's like, oh, it's dead, there's not, like, what am I even here? Or, oh my god, there is so much happening, I am overwhelmed, I'm just gonna withdraw.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Anamaria Dorgo: So, that's also one of the, the things that it's like, oh, there's this fine line that you have to walk to get it right. You're not always gonna get it right, most of the times you're not gonna get it right, but you have to keep going.

Mike Courian: Yeah. Well, I've so enjoyed this time and this conversation that we've had. Thank you for your curious, collaborative, extra, intra, wonderful person that you are. This has been...

Mike Courian: Really fun. I love how deep you are in it. It makes me so happy to see another person who's just like deep down this path. And I think the, the thing I'm most impressed by is that you've found a way to share it with so many others. I think that is so cool. So, um, for the little part that my encouragement plays, I want to say keep going.

Anamaria Dorgo: Thank you. This was a great chat, Mike. I appreciate so much your thoughtful questions and listening and just tickling my brain this morning. Thank you.

Mike Courian: And that wraps up this episode of Shapeshifters. Thanks for being with us. We really want this to become a two-way conversation, so we would love for you to send in any questions or comments that this episode has prompted. You can do that by emailing shapeshifters@makeshapes.com, or if you're listening on Spotify, you can drop it into the comments section. We'll be incorporating these questions and comments into future episodes. Remember, if you want to stay up to date with the podcast, go to the Shapeshifters website, link in the description, and sign up to our community. I'm grateful for all of you. This is a real joy for me to get to do this, so thank you for your support. Until next time, I'm Mike Courian, and this is Shapeshifters.