Groups Don’t Have To Be Their Own Worst Enemy

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The Cliff’s Notes of this Post:

• Are groups of people as aggregations of individuals or as a cohesive group?
• Of the many ways groups can defeat their purpose, two are more common: Groups tend to devolve toward simple social interaction and away from the goal of the group.
• Groups tend to engage in identification and vilification of external enemies.
• Group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever.

The best explanation for the ways in which a group becomes its own worst enemy, comes from a book by W.R. Bion called “Experiences in Groups,” written in the middle of the last century.

Bion was a psychologist who was doing group therapy with groups of neurotics. (Drawing parallels between that and Cambrians is left as an exercise for the reader.) The thing that Bion discovered was that the neurotics in his care were, as a group, conspiring to defeat therapy.

There was no overt communication or coordination. But he could see that whenever he would try to do anything that was meant to have an effect, the group would somehow quash it. And he was driving himself crazy, in the colloquial sense of the term, trying to figure out whether or not he should be looking at the situation as: Are these individuals taking action on their own? Or is this a coordinated group?

He could never resolve the question, and so he decided that the unresolvability of the question was the answer. To the question: Do you view groups of people as aggregations of individuals or as a cohesive group, his answer was: “Hopelessly committed to both.” He said that humans are fundamentally individual, and also fundamentally social. Every one of us has a kind of rational decision-making mind where we can assess what’s going on and make decisions and act on them. And we are all also able to enter viscerally into emotional bonds with other groups of people that transcend the intellectual aspects of the individual.

In fact, Bion was so convinced that this was the right answer that the image he put on the front cover of his book was a Necker cube, one of those cubes that you can look at and make resolve in one of two ways, but you can never see both views of the cube at the same time. So groups can be analyzed both as collections of individuals and having this kind of emotive group experience.

This effect is so steady it’s sometimes called the paradox of groups. It’s obvious that there are no groups without members. But what’s less obvious is that there are no members without a group. Because what would you be a member of?

So there’s this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it’s subconscious, you start getting group effects.

Now, Bion decided that what he was watching with the neurotics was the group defending itself against his attempts to make the group do what they said they were supposed to do. The group was convened to get better; this group of people was in therapy to get better. But they were defeating that. And he said, there are some very specific patterns that they’re entering into to defeat the ostensible purpose of the group meeting together.

One basic pattern Bion recognized was that groups can always devolve away from the sophisticated purpose and towards a more basic purpose. How many times have you been to a meeting that started late – even though everyone was already in the room (or nearby). The tendency to socialize through sharing personal stories and laughter is strong and can defeat the purpose of a group.

The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. If you cared about the cause there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about a particular board member or expenditure. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.

If you want to make it better, there’s a list of things to do. It’s Cambria, right? Just fix it. “No, no, no respect for us, grrrrr …”, the froth would start coming out. The external enemy — nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy.

So even if someone isn’t really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.

Bion has identified this possibility of groups sandbagging their sophisticated goals with these basic urges. And what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary. Robert’s Rules of Order are necessary. Constitutions are necessary. Norms, rituals, laws, the whole list of ways that we say, out of the universe of possible behaviors, we’re going to draw a relatively small circle around the acceptable ones.

He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever. To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.

In the Seventies – a BBS called Communitree launched, one of the very early dial-up BBSes. This was launched when people didn’t own computers, institutions owned computers.

Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue. “Communitree” — the name just says “California in the Seventies.” And the notion was, effectively, throw off structure and new and beautiful patterns will arise.

And, indeed, as anyone who has put discussion software into groups that were previously disconnected has seen, that does happen. Incredible things happen. Over and over again, you see all this incredible upwelling of people who suddenly are connected in ways they weren’t before.

And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school. And who, in 1978, was hanging out in the room with the computer and the modems in it, but the boys of that high school. And the boys weren’t terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.

And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn’t defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying “No, that’s not the kind of free speech we meant.”

But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn’t have, and as a result, they simply shut the site down.

What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they’d set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within. And attack from within is what matters. Communitree wasn’t shut down by people trying to crash or syn-flood the server. It was shut down by people logging in and posting, which is what the system was designed to allow. Some of the users wanted the system to continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion. And other of the users, the high school boys, either didn’t care or were actively inimical. And the system provided no way for the former group to defend itself from the latter.

In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It’s what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done.

And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it’s not just “We need to have some rules.” It’s also “We need to have some rules for making some rules.” And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.

As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.

One thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that’s quite common, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when voting rights are afforded anyone who shows up.

In the early Nineties, a proposal went out to create a Usenet news group for discussing Tibetan culture, called soc.culture.tibet. And it was voted down, in large part because a number of Chinese students who had Internet access voted it down, on the logic that Tibet wasn’t a country; it was a region of China. And in their view, since Tibet wasn’t a country, there oughtn’t be any place to discuss its culture, because that was oxymoronic.

Now, everyone could see that this was the wrong answer. The people who wanted a place to discuss Tibetan culture should have it. That was the core group. But because the one person/one vote model on Usenet said “Anyone who’s on Usenet gets to vote on any group,” sufficiently contentious groups could simply be voted away.

Imagine today if, in Cambria, people had to be polled before any group could be created. The people who want to have those discussions are the people who matter. And absolute citizenship, with the idea that if you can show up, you are a citizen, is a harmful pattern, because it is the tyranny of the majority.

In all successful communities, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively. Gardens the environment, to keep it growing, to keep it healthy.

So the core group needs ways to defend itself — both in getting started and because of the effects I talked about earlier — the core group needs to defend itself so that it can stay on its sophisticated goals and away from its basic instincts.

The Wikipedia has a system that works, with a volunteer fire department, a group of people who care to an unusual degree about the success of the Wikipedia. And they have enough leverage, because of the way wikis work, they can always roll back graffiti and so forth, that that thing has stayed up despite repeated attacks. So leveraging the core group is a really powerful system.

One more thing you must accept: All groups of any integrity have a constitution. The constitution is always partly formal and partly informal. At the very least, the formal part is included in By-Laws and other organizing documents.

The informal part is the sense of “how we do it around here.” And no matter what is included in the formal part, there will always be an informal part as well. You can’t separate the two. The informal part develops over time and is a combination of the formal and the social norms of the community outside the group.

Collective action, coordination, organization, cooperative intelligence – the list of terms and jargon is endless. Whatever you call it, coming together to affect change in acts or policy is a complex undertaking that requires at least some attention be spent on creating and maintaining the structure and tools that keep the group from becoming its own worst enemy.

Adapted from “A Group is its own worst enemy” – by Clay Shirky June 2003

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