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

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. 

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.

Growing your tribe creates more resources that can allow you to reach higher goals. New people bring in new knowledge, new ideas, more attention, etc. At the same time, as the tribe grows it becomes increasingly harder to maintain highly trust-based group dynamics.

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.

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. 

For a community to remain healthy, it is crucial to periodically “prune” its structures—removing systems that no longer support the purpose of the tribe. You want to preserve the essence, while getting rid of the frills. Good pruning mechanisms also create more space for innovation—you don’t risk getting stuck with useless systems that stick around... See more

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.  

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.