The role of tribes in achieving lasting impact and how to create them - LessWrong

By tribes, we refer to what is essentially a tight-knit support community. Members of a tribe have shared goals, values and interests. But that doesn’t yet capture all of why we are interested in tribes over other types of communities. Beyond the shared interests (which is something we also find in firms, unions or clubs, for example), a tribe is c... See more

We don’t have a good sense for what the maximal “carrying capacity” of a tribe is. If you are interested in growing your tribe, you probably want to adopt a slow and careful approach, one that allows you to slow down further or take a step back if it looks like you have been moving too fast.  

A successful tribe is not one that never fails at coordinating. It’s one that is antifragile—one that has a set of proven-to-be-robust mechanisms to handle failures.

To some people, disagreements feel like conflict; they don’t have to be, and avoiding disagreements comes with a high price. It doesn’t have to feel bad to figure out where you might be wrong if you learn to disentangle your self-worth from your belief system.

True belonging is always the product of co-construction. This requires mechanisms that: create buy-in, ensure people are and feel heard, facilitate collective decision making and error-correction.

Five steps on how to build a tribe:Identification: find and be foundCommunication: increase bandwidthCooperation: create valueReification: make your group “a thing”Adaptation: find the dark forces to preserve the essence of your thing

Tribes are living organisms. Even if nobody joins or leaves, members of the group change and the world around the group changes. Your rules, norms and goals will evolve. 

Coordinating with other humans is key to achieving lasting impact. Coordination helps us grow our well of common knowledge, build things, become better humans and create more value for the world than we could on our own.

It is not a coincidence that humans have developed ever more complex forms of coordination: it unlocks positive-sum dynamics that realize more and more of potential.