Hi, there! It's K5desu. With the start of my new career just around the corner, my involvement with the community I've been a part of since my student days is entering a new phase. To organize my thoughts, I want to outline the current stance of "Horizon Vertical"—the alums organization I am currently involved in—and the real dilemmas I am facing right now.
The Status Quo: Horizon Vertical's 3 Key Activities
Currently, Horizon Vertical operates around three main initiatives:
- Weekly Manabi Share (Weekly): An activity I host. A quick session where members spend about a minute sharing their weekly progress and achievements with each other.
- HV Dispatch (Monthly): A radio-style content broadcast sent out to members once a month.
- Alums Meetup (Annually): An in-person event where alums give back to current Horizon members by sharing real-world job-hunting advice and expanding their career perspectives.
Deconstructing the Community: Purpose, Goal, Means
To analyze the situation from a higher level of abstraction, we can evaluate Horizon Vertical's current structure through the "Purpose-Goal-Means" framework:
- Purpose: To support and give back to current members.
- Goal: To maintain continuous vertical and horizontal connections among alums (which ultimately enables the "give back" to current students).
- Means: The three activities listed above (Manabi Share, Dispatch, Meetup).
On paper, this structure makes sense. In reality, however, the operations are not running as smoothly as they could. For example, while the "Weekly Manabi Share" happens regularly, the participants have unfortunately dwindled down to a small, fixed group.
The Means Becoming the End & The Conflict of Motivation
If I dig deeper into my personal motivation for hosting the "Weekly Manabi Share," the situation is a bit complex.
The original purpose is to foster alums connections and support current students. However, the primary reason I am able to sustain this weekly commitment is actually quite personal: creating an environment where I have to report my progress helps me build my own habits. In other words, because I prioritize my own habit-building above the community's overarching purpose, I manage to keep the activity alive.
This brings up a critical question: "Will I still need this space after I start working?"
Once I join a new company, similar environments for progress reporting and self-improvement will naturally emerge within my workplace or new professional networks. When that happens, what is the actual value of the "Weekly Manabi Share" within Horizon Vertical?
Moving Toward a Fundamental Restructuring Phase
The challenges I am facing right now boil down to two core issues:
- Re-evaluating the Goal through the Means: Means only exist to achieve a Goal. If our current activities (Means) are losing their significance, we must question the validity of the targeted "Goal" (continuous vertical and horizontal connections).
- Lack of Consensus: The true value and necessity of maintaining these "connections" doesn't feel fully digested or shared as a common consensus among all members.
Personally, something feels slightly off about continuing our activities under the current structure. Since the Means are simply a tool to achieve a Goal, questioning the relevance of the Means naturally forces us to re-evaluate the Goal itself.
My current plan is to keep running the existing activities and observe the situation until I settle into my new job. If the activities still fail to function properly or gain traction, I need to seriously consider taking a step back to re-evaluate our Goal—the true necessity and ideal shape of the vertical and horizontal connections among alums.
Because my personal environment is changing, this is exactly the right time to stop running on pure momentum and start seriously facing the community's true raison d'être.