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

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.

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. 

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.  

Working together can also be an extremely enriching and sobering experience. It is enriching because people learn, gain traction, motivation and a sense of meaning. It’s sobering because it provides a real-world test to the quality and strength of the coordination fabric your group has been building, stripping away the relative comfort of theoretic... See more

Members of a tribe expect to benefit from investing into the tribe - and they might decide to leave if those benefits never manifest - but it matters little to them when and how exactly they receive that benefit.

In this post, we outline our current models for modern-day tribe building. We hope to initiate an exchange on the topic, motivate others to look into this, too, and achieve more together.

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.

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.

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.