The High-Resonance Era: Why 2026 is the Year Community Professionals Stop Counting and Start Orchestrating
We have reached peak digital noise. As synthetic content saturates every digital channel, a radical reality has taken hold: "Real" is the new luxury. In an environment of generated interactions, the community industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation. The era of mindless growth has ended; the era of human resonance has begun.
My recent discussion—hosted in partnership with Hivebrite—with Yurii Lazaruk (Freelance Unlocked) and Whitney Marin (Hivebrite) crystallized a shift I have been tracking through the 2026 trend reports from Horizon Media and VML Intelligence. The community builder can no longer serve as a mere moderator and cheerleader for connection. In 2026, we must embrace our role as strategic orchestrators managing high-resonance ecosystems.
Watch the full panel discussion.
This article maps that new landscape. We explore why intimacy outperforms scale, how to navigate the "jagged frontier" of AI, and why your most critical KPI is now the quality of your internal stakeholder investment.
The "Ecosystem" Framework: Moving Beyond the On-Ramp
Our profession has long struggled with the "community everywhere" buzzword—the idea that a brand must maintain a deep presence in every social channel where customers or members happen to be. This philosophy is simply not tenable or sustainable for community professionals.
Virtual communities are ecosystems. In this model, public social platforms like LinkedIn or X serve most capably as on-ramps. They are entrances to the funnel. The high-resonance interaction—the "built-for-purpose" community of practice—requires a dedicated, curated space designed for depth rather than reach.
In the panel discussion, Whitney Marin described this as the Minimum Viable Community:
"I think we'll see people kind of shifting away from this concept of more is better or bigger is better and really lean into redefining what scale looks like... Larger numbers don't always translate to stronger communities. I think we'll see people really focusing on intimacy and maintaining more of a depth over breadth approach."
VML Intelligence identifies this shift as Curated Collectivism. People are consciously rejecting broad, shallow networks in favor of "Fourth Places"—hybrid environments where shared identity and belonging are the primary value drivers.
Navigating the "Jagged Technological Frontier"
Artificial Intelligence is quite possibly the most disruptive force in our profession’s history, but the question is no longer about job replacement. We are now determining where human attention fits in a synthetic world.
I refer to this boundary as the "jagged technological frontier." This term, popularized by a 2023 Harvard Business School/Wharton study, describes the uneven limit of AI's capabilities. AI excels at tasks inside the frontier—summarization, data analysis, and routine administrative chores. However, it fails unexpectedly at tasks outside that frontier—those requiring deep social intelligence, conflict resolution, and nuanced warmth.
Mapping Your Tasks Against the Frontier
To embrace your role as a strategic orchestrator, you must map your community workload against this frontier:
Inside the Frontier (Delegate to AI Agents): Transcription of community calls, sentiment analysis of thousands of posts, routine member tagging, and generating initial drafts for repetitive FAQ responses.
Outside the Frontier (Protect for Humans): De-escalating a heated debate between long-term members, identifying the "unspoken" needs of a high-value stakeholder, and crafting the core narrative that gives the community its "warmth".
AI has graduated to a proactive collaborator, a trend Horizon Media calls Agent-ification. We are moving into an era of delegating multi-step actions to autonomous AI agents. Yurii Lazaruk noted how this refocuses the community builder’s role:
"AI is my co-pilot. I don't really trust everything it says to me... you can delegate a lot of repetitive routine work to AI and you will have more time to build like this real human connections and real human relationships."
The most valuable skill in 2026 is strategic orchestration. You are the "Human-AI Virtuoso," possessing the vision to direct AI tools toward goals that feel human, not algorithmic.
The "Slow Punk" Revolt and Digital Intent
Synthetic content is flooding social feeds, leading consumers to develop a sharp eye for "AI slop"—low-quality media that erodes trust. In response, the Slow Punk movement has emerged. This is a defiant cultural resistance to digital saturation, prioritizing analog, tactile, and unedited experiences.
In our communities, this means "polished" is losing its authority. Whitney suggested one highly practical way to signal this authenticity:
"It's okay to show up as your true self... If you're thinking about whether or not you should edit your typo in copy, maybe once in a while, just leave it in there. Just see what that does and see if maybe that sparks something really original in your community."
A typo is a signal of human life. It proves human presence in a synthetic environment. Our job is now to defend Digital Intent: helping members reclaim their attention from the algorithms that dominate modern life.
Stakeholder Investment Mapping: Looking Inward
A critical realization from our discussion is that communities often die because internal funding dries up, not because members lose interest. In 2026, we must measure the quality of stakeholder investment with the same rigor we apply to member engagement.
I recommend a Stakeholder Resonance Score, modeled after Horizon Media’s "Culture Q" algorithm. We score internal business units on two dimensions:
Impact Score: Measures how many departments (Marketing, Product, Support) are actively co-creating with the community.
Durability Score: Measures the long-term nature of their budget commitment and roadmap integration.
How to Map Your Stakeholders
Tier 1 (The Partners): Departments that attend community strategy sessions and use community insights to drive product roadmap changes.
Tier 2 (The Consumers): Departments that only read your monthly reports but don’t contribute resources or time.
Tier 3 (The Skeptics): Departments that view the community as a "cost center" to be trimmed.
Your goal for 2026 is to move stakeholders from Tier 3 to Tier 1 through Co-creation. Yurii highlighted the need to move from "protecting" the community to co-creating it with these stakeholders:
"We don't really want to protect community. We want to co-create community... you have to kind of go and ask—go to a marketing team, a product team, a sales team—and ask them, 'Hey, how can I help you reach your business goals?'"
This aligns with the Brand Democracy trend, where brands forge ongoing collaborations with their communities to dissolve the barriers between the institution and the user.
Operational Agility: Mastering the OODA Loop for Community Ops
Community building in 2026 requires more than a steady hand; it requires the agility to pivot when the digital environment shifts under your feet. One methodology I lean on for this agility is the OODA loop—Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. This framework originated with Colonel John Boyd, a legendary US Air Force flight instructor known as "40-Second Boyd" because he could win any dogfight in under a minute. He achieved this through superior mental processing, getting inside his opponent's decision-making cycle to anticipate their next move. In Community Operations, we use the OODA loop to "shoot down" ineffective tactics and unlearn the defaults that no longer serve us.
This loop is the necessary response to the "polycrisis"—a state where multiple global crises are not just occurring simultaneously but are increasingly uncertain, chaotic, and complex. In this environment, the macro world demands flexibility and speed to ascertain value more quickly. Whitney Marin highlighted this need for intentionality, noting that we must "scale with milestones" and "build intentionally," focusing on "depth over breadth" rather than chasing arbitrary growth.
Stage 1: Observe (The Data Layer)
The observation phase involves tracking the raw signals from your ecosystem. You are looking for specific friction points where members face hurdles in their journey. In 2026, this means observing the rise of "AI Fatigue"—a state where 60% of consumers now question the authenticity of online content due to the rise of synthetic media. Members have developed a sharp eye for "AI slop" and lazy, automated interactions.
Stage 2: Orient (The Cultural Context)
This is the most critical phase. You must contextualize your observations against the macro-trends identified in the 2026 reports. If your members are logging off, you must determine if they are participating in the Slow Punk revolt mentioned earlier. Orientation allows you to see the "why" behind the data by filtering it through shifts like the Real Premium, where 71% of US adults say they would pay more for entertainment created entirely by humans.
Stage 3: Decide (The Design of Tiny Experiments)
Once you understand the context, you must decide on a course of action. I advocate for "Tiny Experiments", a concept explored by Anne-Laure Le Cunff in her 2025 book Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. Like the OODA Loop, Le Cunff describes how to use small, managed gambles that allow you to test a hypothesis without risking the entire ecosystem’s stability—with the primary payoff being what you learn, not just whether a specific metric goes up.. This approach aligns with the Controlled-Risk Economy trend, where consumers are embracing managed risks as a form of discovery and entertainment. By breaking strategy into tiny, manageable steps, you avoid the trap of "optimization at all costs" that leads to burnout.
Stage 4: Act (The Kill Switch)
Action must be swift. You deploy the experiment to a small cohort and monitor the outcomes. If the experiment provides immediate relief or excitement, you scale it. If it fails to move the needle, you "shoot it down" quickly and restart the loop. This prevents the "slow death" of communities that cling to outdated tactics for years because they are afraid to admit a gamble did not pay off. Yurii Lazaruk noted that AI can assist here as a "co-pilot," handling the "repetitive routine work" of the "Act" phase so the human orchestrator has more time for "real human relationships".
Constructive Disruption: The Internal OODA Loop
OODA works effectively with internal stakeholders. By getting inside their decision-making loops, you can be disruptive in a constructive way. This allows you to challenge the thinking of leaders and help them reframe their understanding of the value community drives. As Yurii Lazaruk emphasized, the goal is to stop "protecting" the community and start "co-creating" it by acting as a "bridge between other teams and your community members". This practice supports the shift toward Brand Democracies, where the definition between who is an employee and who is a community member will get less clear.
By mastering these cycles, community builders pivot from being "cost centers" to essential drivers of a new calculus that prioritizes emotional return on investment and enduring stability.
The Transformation Economy: Return on Impact
We have transitioned from the "Experience Economy" to the Transformation Economy. People no longer want to be entertained; they want to be changed. VML Intelligence reports that 87% of people value experiences that leave them feeling changed.
I saw this clearly in a community I work with that helps people quit smoking and vaping. While it is useful to track "Engagement"—how many people posted, how many threads were created, how many likes were shared, those metrics don’t get at the real story.
The true value was Return on Impact. You could not fully understand the community's success until members started sharing their unedited, visceral stories of change. One member told us, "I would be dead if I didn't have this space." Another shared how they finally felt "free" after twenty years of addiction.
Executive leaders are not just "left-brain computers" responding to logic. They are humans who need to be moved by a narrative. To secure your 2026 budget, you must pair your hard data with these human stories of transformation. Clicks show interest whereas transformation shows indispensability.
The 2026 Framework: Crawl, Walk, Run
Implementing these cultural shifts requires a phased approach. I categorize these as "Crawl" (foundational changes), "Walk" (operational shifts), and "Run" (advanced strategic integration).
Crawl: Establish "Real Premium" Signals
The Strategy: Transition your community from corporate "polish" to radical reality.
The Action: Stop over-editing your content. Instead of a perfectly scripted video update, record a 60-second voice note or an unedited "walk and talk" video for your members. This signals human presence and vulnerability.
The Metric: Measure Shared Identity NPS—how strongly members feel the community reflects their personal values and identity.
Walk: Operationalize the OODA Loop
The Strategy: Use AI agents to handle the "Disruption Zone"—those routine chores like scheduling, basic onboarding queries, or archive tagging that cause high overwhelm but offer low emotional value.
The Action: Implement the OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) for community operations.
Observe: Watch for specific friction points where members get "stuck" in the journey.
Orient: Contextualize that friction against your 2026 resonance goals.
Decide: Launch a "Tiny Experiment" (e.g., an AI-powered "concierge" to handle the first 24 hours of onboarding).
Act: Deploy the experiment to a small cohort. If the "Thrill Velocity" or member relief isn't immediate, "shoot down" the tactic and try the next experiment.
Run: Leading a "Brand Democracy"
The Strategy: Dissolve the line between "member" and "stakeholder".
The Action: Launch a formal co-creation lab. This isn't a suggestion box; it is a collaborative space where members directly influence your product innovation, your boardroom priorities, and your brand's cultural narrative.
Outcome Tracking: Move your executive reporting to focus on Outcome Tracking. Measure the specific delta in a member's life or professional capability after 90 days in the ecosystem. This is your ultimate 2026 proof-point.
Next Steps: How I Can Help
Clocktower Advisors helps bridge the gap between these macro-trends and your specific business goals. Here are four ways we can partner to future-proof your community strategy for 2026:
2026 High-Resonance Strategy Audit: A 90-minute evaluation designed to identify your community’s "AI Slop" risks and uncover the specific "Human Premium" signals your members are craving.
Fractional Strategic Orchestration: I join your leadership team on a part-time basis to help you architect the human-AI systems that automate the administrative chores so your people can scale their high-resonance relationships.
The "Slow Punk" Stakeholder Workshop: A half-day session to align your internal teams (Marketing, Sales, Product) on a co-creation roadmap that builds deep internal buy-in without breaching member trust.
Community ROI Narrative Building: We move beyond vanity metrics to create a data-backed storytelling platform that speaks the emotional and logical language your executive team needs to hear to maintain funding and expansion.
Annotated Sources
What's Next for Communities in 2026 (Webinar Transcript): A collaboration with Hivebrite featuring Yurii Lazaruk and Whitney Marin. It explores unlearning community-building defaults and the move toward intimacy over scale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlcpadQ3nEE
Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier (Dell'Acqua et al., 2023): A landmark study from Harvard, Wharton, and MIT defining the uneven boundary of AI capabilities and how to effectively integrate AI into high-value knowledge work.
Horizon Futures Report: Top Trends 2026: A comprehensive strategic blueprint identifying the cultural shifts toward "Real Premium," "Agent-ification," and the "Slow Punk" resistance to optimization.
Le Cunff, A. (2025). Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.: A strategic guide exploring how to navigate high-pressure environments by breaking down complex systems into manageable, low-risk trials.
VML Intelligence: The Future 100 - 2026: A global trend forecast providing data on "The Transformation Economy," "Curated Collectivism," and the rise of "Brand Democracies" .
