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.

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.

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. 

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

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

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... See more

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.

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... See more

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.