Allow your counterparties to self-select.

This is a powerful meta-strategy at the core of many strategic judo moves.

Your counterparties might be your users, your peers, or your partners.

The default approach is to identify a set of counterparties and then invest time and effort to land them.

This has some upsides: a coherent vision that the whole team agrees with reduces coordination costs by huge amounts.

But it also has many downsides:

You have to do the work to identify the counterparties.

You might compel their superficial cooperation but not get actual alignment.

You might miss that there are other much more willing participants nearby.

Using the self-selection meta-strategy has many benefits:

The counterparties do the work themselves.

You get intrinsically motivated counterparties.

You can find good counterparties even among entities you didn't expect.

Think of this approach as nurturing seeds of intrinsic motivation that you find, not trying to force it.

Alternatively, think of it as a big butterfly net to catch butterflies.

A few downsides of this approach:

It doesn't look like anything, so (in any organization bigger than some small size) it's hard to get recognized for it.

You can't rush it or control it much.

It might not work! For example, if there aren't enough counterparties in your vicinity, or there isn't any motivation.

When you use this playbook you want to maximize your surface area (a big butterfly net) to counterparties so you're more likely to find one.

This playbook is the fundamental idea behind doorbells in the jungle.