Tony
When I was a kid, I was perceived as being a "brain". In grade school, this meant was treated in certain ways. Other kids had their own tribes, hood, jock, or otherwise. But, very quickly, we self-selected and self-segregated into groups.
In the seventh grade, Tony Heupel and I were given a project to do together for an English class. We went off to the library to work on it. I'd known Tony since the third grade which at that time meant basically for ever.
Tony was a hood. He was a hood's hood. But I knew he had a secret: he wasn't stupid. I'd known it for a long time.
So we're in the library and Tony specifically picks a place where we can't be observed. He gets really into the assignment and we do some great work together. Towards the end I say, "Do you want to do the presentation?" He replied, "Naw, I can't. I'm a hood, you should do it cuz you're a brain."
This was from a guy who just spent two hours showing keen insights into what we were working on. Tony as an individual could perform. But in public, as a tribal member, he had rules to adhere to.
The Urge to Merge
The need to define ourselves and others by associations appears to be universal. We can only remember so many people, so many specific details. So we tend to lump people (including ourselves) into associations and then extrapolate back out from those associations.
If I belong to Seattle's Granite Curling Club, you would think of me as a curler. You would expect a few things from that:
- I would practice from time to time
- Cold doesn't particularly bother me
- I know how to use a broom
- I don't hate Canadians
- I have drank beer
- I have the strength of character necessary to participate in the world's most silly looking sport.
These are traits you would instantly assume I have because of my affiliation. Finding out that I don't particularly like beer would seem incongruous, but would not make you change your assumptions about curlers in general. I would be, for you, a curler who doesn't like beer. But curlers, for you, would still be beer drinkers.
We have the ability to separate out individuals from groups, while still adhering to the notion that groups have validity. Because, oddly enough, they do.
The premise of the Wisdom of the Crowds, and crowdsourcing in general, is that on the whole human patterns are predictable - even when individuals have a great deal of personal freedom.
I can violate category 5 of curling, while still adhering to the remaining 5 items on the list.
While crowdsourcing is a valuable new insight, the urge to merge people into prepackaged chunks is as old as human beings. Since it's been around that long, we tend to pay attention to it.
Cubic Jungle
When we are in our labyrinthine cube farm, sitting in our 8x8 or 10x10 space, surrounded by others - we are not as far from when we were hunting and gathering ancestors as we'd like to believe. The basic building blocks of social interaction are alive and well, as they were millions of years ago.
We identify people as in-group or out-group, we identify threats personal and social, and we form affiliations based on a combination of altruism and need.
These tendencies serve us well: they need not be feared. Understanding them, though, is very important. A lack of understanding has led to the demise of countless companies or at least to the making of some very bad decisions.
I had a client once who was the victim of a very common adversarial intra-office relationship: marketing and everyone else. Why is marketing so often seen as an internal enemy?
For my client, it was because value needs were divided by department. Everyone's performance was rated on items specifically related to their activity (for marketing the goal was simply "sell stuff"). No one's performance was rated on providing overall value to the client or even the company.
Again, this is a very common story.
The result of this? The departments become "cost centers" and begin to compete. Marketing sells whatever they can to make their sales goals, regardless of its value to the client or to the company. They promise new features for existing products and justify it by getting the client to "pay for it."
Marketing never takes into account the on-going support of customized features for specific clients. Why? Because it's contrary to their goals. It's not their problem.
This isolates the group, as everyone becomes more and more annoyed with them and they with others. ("Why does engineering have to be so bitchy when we make a big sale? We're only doing our jobs!")
Tribes then form, quite naturally. There would always be a Marketing tribe, but now it is at war with engineering. What you get then, is in-fighting that is counter to the corporations' well-being.
We can blame this on Marketing - it's tempting to do so. But the blame is less important than the dynamic. At a policy level, someone creates a no-win situation for marketing by telling them that selling was their only goal.
Their performance goals created a tribal designation as well-defined and limiting for them as it was for Tony in the seventh grade. When Marketing performs according to expectations, they get accolades from some and grief from others.
The Power of the Tribes
Tribes don't always hate each other. Tribes often cooperate. History has no shortage of strong civilizations taken over by loosely affiliated but collaborating tribes.
A marketing tribe is a powerful tool. They have a common set of goals, they speak a common language, they can rapidly mobilize to deal with an opportunity or a threat. But they are not a business.
You can't have a business of just marketers - even if you are a marketing consultancy.
Similarly, you can't have a business of just accountants or developers or short order cooks.
Internally, tribes educate their members, innovate within their sphere, create efficient processes, and rapidly communicate tribal messages.
Tribes self-optimize.
You don't want to kill off your tribes, no matter what issues they might currently have.
Tribes and Value
Tribal alignment, both internally and externally, happens when value needs are communicated well. Before the Clinton administration, cities were viewed as autonomous units by the Federal Government. Funding for projects was scarce and regionally allocated. So cities within a region would fight over funding.
The City of Phoenix and the City of Scottsdale would fight like cats and dogs over transportation money. There was a total tribal division between the departments of transportation. Each side had its own war stories, pejoratives and theories about the other tribe.
Their value needs were entirely at-odds because they actively fought over the same funding allocation. A zero-sum game of funding meant bad governance for the region of the Phoenitians (and the Scottsdealies).
In the mid-nineties, the Clinton Administration said, "We've got some lovely money here for you guys, but you have to cooperate. Write up an ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems) Master Plan and we will give you money to realize it. But it has to be regional and show true regional benefit."
I was part of the consultant team that wrote that plan. At first the two tribes came to the table with their guns drawn. "The Feds say I have to like you, Scottsdealie, but it's hard to get past the smell."
Their value needs were still not aligned.
I wrote two numbers on a white board. One was $50,000,000. The other was $0. I pointed to the big one and said, "This is what we get if we cooperate." I pointed to the $0 and said, "This is what we get if don't."
Suddenly, their value needs aligned.
Imagine that.
One simple policy shift had profound (and I do mean profound) impacts on the relations of two historic adversaries.
You and Your Tribe
We've all earned ourselves memberships in a myriad of tribes. Family, religion, sport, entertainment, professional - we have different memberships. We change our actions between them. Don't believe me? Your ballroom dancing group expects very different hip movements from you than your board of directors meeting.
What's interesting is that the value of the tribe isn't necessarily the actions of the tribe. While your marketing group's goals are misaligned with development, you might go to work every day rarin' for battle. But the moment they become aligned your attitude at work changes, your compassion for the other group changes, and your focus changes.
Tony understood, on some level, that when he was studying with me, we were a tribe of two working towards a goal. That goal wasn't part of his "hood" tribe which took precedence when we left the library. If, somehow, I could come up with a way to make good grades part of hooddom (maybe cans of skoal for every B or something) then his reaction would have been very different.
The thing to remember is that the Wisdom of the Crowds seems to be a very reactive phenomenon - or at least a passive one. A bunch of people do something and in the end they more or less make the right decision.
But those are individuals. The Wisdom of the Crowds doesn't directly relate to tribal membership because tribal decision making tends to react toward group protection and survival. This makes tribes tend toward the inward-focused and conservative.
Conservative positions tend to examine personal value needs first, their immediate tribe second, their other tribal affiliations third, and on down the line.
This often precludes a systematic approach that helps alleviate the true problems and not merely relieve the impacts on you and those close to you.
Your tribe will often fall immediately into a defensive stance when there is a perceived threat. It is up to you to notice this tendency and see if it is due to value needs being misaligned somewhere in the channel.
Daylighting these value mis-matches is the first step to truly solving intra-office rivalries and helping the company focus on quality for the customer. It also goes a long way toward making your job not a tiny pocket of hell.
Jim -
When I think about this, I think of a couple different kinds of tribes.
Some tribes are exclusive. You gain membership through some difficult initiation ritual, or by virtue of birth. Outsiders are shunned, or at least kept at a distance, and there are secrets within the group which are not even hinted at by others.
Other tribes are acquisitive, always looking for new members. You are recruited to the tribe, and you are expected to recruit others to the tribe. Outsiders as seen as the not yet converted, or the not yet evangelized.
Somehow these two approaches are different enough that I think they have to fit into this discussion, but I don't know how yet.
Posted by: Edward Vielmetti | 26 April 2008 at 14:30
Jim, another great post. And the follow up as well.
My gut reaction to all the talk about groups is that I'm not sure that there are groups. There are collections of individuals. We can gather and discuss amongst ourselves. We can organize for action -- let's have a block party. But I think that groups are ideas we have about our rag tag collection. That is a group is a conceptual thing.
I think this is even more true of roles. Roles do not exist in the world; only in our minds. And maybe the same is true of groups. I'm not sure I can actually grok this, but it intrigues me.
-Bill
Posted by: Bill Anderson | 28 April 2008 at 20:13
Edward basically said what I came here to say, except that I was going to refer to the the theories of http://clarewgraves.com, where he talks about the two different emergent value systems that come very close to matching what you, and what Ed are talking about.
Graves found that people solved problems of existence in groups by:
Sacrificing "self" to the "group" for safety (the original tribe)
Sacrificing "self" now for reward later (future generations or afterlife)
Sacrificing "self" now so that all may gain now
sacrificing "self" to groups of those who share view holistic view
I think the first and last are "tribes". The original tribes, and the "new" tribes that McLuhan said were and are now emerging.
The "Us and Them" is supposed to disappear in the last "tribe described above. But, the human mind derives HUGE value from dichotomies and duality framing. So, I think we are coupled with "Us and them" even when we have the self realization that we are doing it. We just become better at creating a subtle distinctions, many shades of gray areas. But those gray areas are rooted in a simpler "rule": "us and them". An algorithm for operating that yes, I believe some people learn to diminish or even shut off when solving problems. Yet, still persists, I believe in every human brain-mind system
Posted by: Sam Rose | 07 May 2008 at 12:01