Why Copying What Works Usually Doesn't

In 2019, WeWork was valued at $47 billion. It had neon signs, open floor plans, kombucha on tap, and a person whose job title was “community manager.” Dozens of coworking spaces that came after it adopted many of these same visible features.

The coworking boom produced many small operators, and many of them struggled to maintain occupancy or stay open.

What WeWork built, and what many of its imitators copied, was a visible version of success without the conditions that produced it. WeWork is an example of what happens in companies all the time:

People copy what success looks like, not what produces it.

We see what successful groups look like and assume those visible features created the loyalty. Behavioral science and organizational theory suggest that assumption is grossly incomplete.


People Are Drawn to What they Can See

With social media, many things seem optically obvious. Loyalty shows up as engagement, energy is read as culture, and retention is taken as stability. What is not visible is what produced any of it.

This is a well-documented problem in how humans process cause and effect. Daniel Kahneman’s research on cognitive biases shows that people often look at outcomes and assume they understand what caused them, even when they do not (Kahneman, 2011).

Organizations often copy each other when outcomes are uncertain.

This is called institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio, P.J., & Powell, W.W. 1983), where companies become similar because similarity is treated as legitimacy. Instead of copying what produced success, organizations copy what successful organizations look like. That is why coworking spaces copied things like:

These are visible signals, not evidence of the system that produced the outcome.

We see what a thriving group looks like and assume those visible features created the loyalty. In reality, they are often the result of processes that are not visible from the outside.


Understanding Psychological Contracts

WeWork presented itself as more than office space. The marketing emphasized belonging and community, and the physical space reinforced that message.

Structurally, the relationship remained simple. People paid for access to workspace and services.

This is where psychological contracts matter. A psychological contract is the belief people form about what a relationship means beyond the written terms (Rousseau, 1989).

When branding signals community, but the structure remains transactional, people can interpret the relationship as more relational than it is in practice.

In market settings, people evaluate exchanges in terms of cost and benefit: “Is this worth what I’m paying?”

In social settings, people evaluate relationships in terms of continuity: “Do I still feel connected to this?”

People evaluate social relationships differently than market ones, making them more tolerant of cost and friction when they believe a relationship is relational rather than transactional. (Heyman & Ariely, 2004)

WeWork combined:

That combination can create the appearance of belonging without requiring deep interdependence between members.

When expectations and structure don’t match, people eventually respond to the structure rather than the story.

This doesn’t mean no one experienced community; surely some did. It means that experience depended on how closely expectations matched what the system actually delivered.

As prices increased and alternative workspaces became available, many members left, which is consistent with behavior in systems that remain primarily transactional in structure.

Psychologists Henri Tajfel and Jonathan Turner spent decades studying how group identity actually forms. Their finding, replicated across hundreds of studies since their foundational 1979 paper, is that identity does not form because people share a space, a membership tier, or an aesthetic, but because they share meaning. Specifically, it forms when people feel that belonging to a group says something true about who they are (Tajfel and Turner, 1979).

There are four conditions that tend to show up in real communities: membership, influence, integration of needs, and shared emotional connection. (McMillan and Chavis, 1986)

People stay when it is clear who the group is for and who it is not for. Belonging only works when it signals something meaningful, not just access.

People stay when they feel like they matter to what happens in the group. If someone leaves and nothing changes, it signals their participation didn’t matter, which reduces their attachment to the group.

People stay when the group actually helps them in real ways. Not through branding or messaging, but by meeting needs that matter in practice.

People stay when they spend time together doing things with others that require effort, coordination, or shared experience. That repeated time builds familiarity and connection. One-off moments don’t do that.

None of these are visible from the outside and show up in how people behave over time.

Visible things create attention. Invisible things create cohesion.

A common mistake is confusing attractive (visibly) vs durable (invisible).

Durable groups usually have:

These are not aesthetic choices but design decisions about how people relate to each other.

When organizations rely only on surface signals, they may attract attention, but they often struggle to sustain loyalty.

Copying what successful groups look like is a rational response to uncertainty but it lacks the full picture of how humans relate to one another.

The key distinction is between what you can see from the outside and what is actually producing the outcome. They are often not the same thing.

DiMaggio, P.J., & Powell, W.W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48(2), 147–160.

Heyman, J., & Ariely, D. (2004). Effort for payment: A tale of two markets. Psychological Science, 15(11), 787–793.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

McMillan, D.W., & Chavis, D.M. (1986). Sense of community: A definition and theory. Journal of Community Psychology, 14(1), 6–23.

Rousseau, D.M. (1989). Psychological and implied contracts in organizations. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 2(2), 121–139.

Tajfel, H., & Turner, J.C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W.G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.