Most community strategy is borrowed best practices. We design ours
from evidence.
We design strategy.
We don’t borrow it.
A design discipline, applied to human connection.
Long before “design thinking” became a workshop format, designers were building disciplined ways to move from a messy problem to a defensible decision. Our practice is rooted in that tradition, the diverge-and-converge lineage of Koberg and Bagnall’s Universal Traveler, which predates the consultancies that later packaged it. We apply it to community and ecosystem strategy, where almost everyone else still works from platform defaults and a list of best practices.
Diverge to explore, converge to decide. Repeated with intent.
We use AI across research, exploration, and evaluation. We don’t hand it the judgment calls. The relationships are the point, and those stay human.
A healthy community is one of the best foresight instruments a company has. We read it for where the market is going, not only for how last quarter performed.
One practice.
Three ways in.
Our work runs on curiosity, discovery, and design. Every engagement starts with a real question and a clear-eyed look at what is going on, then designs the way forward. Most leaders arrive on one of three questions.
What should this become?
For leadership teams who sense an opportunity but can’t yet name the program. We run a structured foresight and concept process: an expedition to genuinely different futures, then the discipline to bring the strongest one back as something a board can fund.
A clear point of view on where this is going, and multiple concepts worth committing to, with the case for the one that wins.
What do we build, and how does it fit together?
For teams with a mandate who need a designed system, not a pile of disconnected activities. We move from research to a community and ecosystem architecture: the programs, the governance, the value model, and the order of operations to stand it up.
A designed strategy your team understands and owns, because they helped build it, not a document handed across the table.
How do we prove the value, and grow it?
For programs already in market that can’t yet show their worth to the business. We connect the community to the outcomes leadership cares about, and to the wider ecosystem it sits inside, so the value becomes visible, defensible, and compounding.
The ability to defend the investment in the language your executives already use, with a measurement model wired to real goals.
/ How we partner
Strategists who’ve lived
with the consequences.
Built before advised
We’ve designed, launched, and grown community at scale, including Dell’s IdeaStorm and a two-million-member forum at Autodesk. The strategy is grounded in what happens after the decision, not theory about it.
Designed with you, not handed over
We work directly with the executives accountable for the outcome, helping direct the teams across community, product, and marketing who carry it out. The strategy is understood and owned at the level that matters by the time we’re done, not handed across the table.
We leave you with conviction
Every engagement ends with something durable: a clear point of view, a designed system, and a team equipped to carry it. Not a document that ages on a shared drive.
Senior strategists, start to finish. No Handoffs.
Structure3C is senior and small by design. No sales team hands you off after signing. You have direct access to the practitioners shaping the work, led by founder Bill Johnston, throughout: weekly working sessions where decisions get made together, a shared workspace where the strategy takes shape in the open, and milestone readouts built for the executives who hold the budget.