Great groups, not great men, do great things

It starts in the family, in our first playground, first school project. Our entire life is made up of navigating different groups’ dynamics. The same applies to the collective human experience.

A nation, a World Cup win, a great music album, a major scientific advance…it is all the work of groups, suggests Colin M Fisher in The Collective Edge: Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups.You think Edison invented incandescent light bulbs? Nope, these predate him. He did patent a new version. Even this was not solo work but we are suckers for Great Man stories. We remember the individual and forget the group. A flip side of this ‘fundamental attribution error’ is that we have an inflated idea of our own contribution to groups.Real teams are humanity’s best tool for solving problems, the book says. Defeating Thanos needs working together. Groups are the seeds from which tomorrows grow.Not all groups have ‘groupiness’, nor can it be achieved by the usual ‘team building’ exercises. These overbill how you need trust to cooperate, but underbill how you need to cooperate to build trust. When a group accomplishes what it sets out to do, that feels good, then it sticks together.

Real teams satisfy all our big drives: autonomy, belonging, competence.Whether you want to change yourself or the world, you need to work with the invisible forces of group dynamics instead of being mindlessly pushed around by them, the book says. This doesn’t just concern traditional team leaders, but everyone who wants to improve their relationships at home, school or work.For example, contrary to common thinking, motivation is not a function of personality.

A meta-analysis of 259 studies confirms that task characteristics have a stronger effect on group effectiveness than smoking has on cancer risk. And task design is the most overlooked condition for promoting group performance.Structural interventions make you the casino, the book says, stacking the deck in your group’s favour. If group structure is flawed, goals unclear and tasks unmotivating, members don’t give it their all, and the group falls into a cycle of dysfunction.Groupthink, however, has negative connotations. That’s what happened in Nazi Germany but it also happens in the schoolyard, the workplace and at the heights of political power. As extreme views grab excessive airtime, out-groups are demonised, and group members also develop a warped sense of what is ‘normal’ among them. The book compares this to a group of kids egging each other to ride their bikes down a dangerous hill, even when almost all of them don’t want to – what are you, chicken?Its antidote is psychological safety – a shared sense that members can disagree and ask questions without fear.

This is not a comfortable space like a warm bath. It can look quite combative as it quizzes the status quo – what’s working? what’s not? why do we do things this way? It’s also fragile, as our Paleolithic brain runs to silence our ideas and questions at every threat to our sense of belonging.The Machiavellian cousin of belonging is status. We do social comparison less with strangers, more with group members, real or imagined. Status is a mental construct but it affects your physiology. Perpetual low status, the book says, can make you less capable over time and shorten your life.