In just two years, a top-down City Hall initiative transformed into a thriving, community-led change movement. Thriving because the community is now more resilient, more connected, and far better at making change stick.

The secret is that the core team from City Hall used hard evidence from how people were connected inside the networks of the community. They stepped back from being the main hub for everything and instead set the conditions for the community to connect, collaborate, and lead itself.

And this paid off! When we first baselined the network of the community, the five most-connected people – all from the core team – held 34% of all connections. Today, the five-most connected people account for just 18%. As a result, connectivity, influence and trust now flow through far more people instead of bottlenecking at the centre.

They created a community-led change movement!

When the core team first measured the community’s connectivity with Innovisor, the community had been established for a little more than one year. About 150 people were involved, connected mostly through monthly virtual meetings during work hours.

The baseline brought good news: everyone was part of one single network. There were no silos, no isolated pockets. The community was not fragmented. That meant the community had the potential to influence everyone involved.

But there was a red flag. Most of the connections flowed to just a handful of individuals, and they were all in the core team. These were the people assigned and paid by the City Hall to create the movement.

• 73% of the community connected to one or more of these five individuals.
• 34% of all the connections went to these top five individuals.

The core team was driving connectivity, but without realizing it, they had become bottlenecks. If those few stepped away or were reassigned to another task, the network of the community risked fragmenting. This is a classic example of one of the six change blockers that stop change from taking root with change – better known as the #SixChangeBlockers.

In just two years, the core team flipped their approach:

• They stepped back from being the driving force of everything.
• They focused on setting enabling conditions that encouraged connections between others.
• They used yearly network insight to track progress and identify risks.

Two big changes happened:

• More people involved: the community grew by 54%.
• More distributed influence: the top five most-connected people now held just 18% of all connections.

Instead of ideas, influence and trust bottlenecking at the centre, they started bubbling up from all corners of the community. The core team enabled the people who had never spoken before, to connect and build trust. The movement was no longer a City Hall Initiative. It had become a community-led movement of change.

The transformation didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the team understood that relationships, trust, and influence are the real drivers of change.

When those three things are spread across a network, movements become stronger, faster, and more resilient. They are not dependent on one leader, one committee, or – in this case – one core team. They belong to everyone who is connected!

That’s when influence stops moving in a straight line from the top. It starts rippling outward, touching every corner of the community.