Polarity is a useful idea. It offers a filter and direction for energy and resources to move. It orients people towards an objective. Even more so with culture at scale.
Culture must be polarizing. Giving away a Ferrari will attract lots of people, but not the right people. So culture must attract the people you want, and repel the people you don’t want. This creates a very scalable tool to curate the members of a community.
A good example of this is Ultraworking. They say “this is for people who want to get a lot of work done”. This has a lot of effects, but the obvious one is that it repels laziness and attracts productivity. And not only that, but it scales to hundreds or thousands of people because of the sheer values and principles that they stand for.
This essentially curates a community that’s highly productive and attractive to a lot of high quality people, and I’d probably be delighted to connect with any and all of them because there’s a good chance their like minded.
Out of the hundreds of business or professional events I’ve attended, this has been the primary defining trait as to the value of the event. Things like venue, parking, HVAC, food, etc are rounding errors compared to the polarizing culture of the organizers, which determines who attends, and whether it’s worth it for me.
Same goes for any event or organization that prioritizes the wrong things, they’ll attract the wrong people, and repel the right people.
Do the opposite, stand for the right things and attract the right people, and repel the wrong ones.