Groups Are What We Need
We are not the fastest, strongest, or hardest to kill. The list of species that would beat us in a fair fight is long.
Humans compensate for those disadvantages by cooperating.
Even the lone-genius stories are group stories: Michael Dell’s edge was building a group that could scale.
A group can give people meaning and make them miserable. Staying on the team is the hard part. Someone says the wrong thing, you’re annoyed, and you still have to show up next week.
Why It Feels Harder Right Now
The environment changed faster than we did:
Change arrives too quickly.
People are asked to absorb more change, tools, decisions, and ambiguity without enough time to process them.
More information obscures priorities.
More information often just leaves teams busy without being aligned.
People are working from different contexts.
They work across generations, distance, media diets, assumptions, and thresholds for conflict. One person arrives Monday through Substack and group texts; another through TikTok and a Slack message from a manager at 10:47 p.m. They are on the same team without sharing the same context.
Shared ground has weakened.
People enter the same meeting with different assumptions, authorities, and realities, with no agreed place to start.
Belonging became easier to leave.
We spent decades removing friction. People became lonelier, less loyal, and less sure whom to trust. When every inconvenience looks like a design flaw, people get less practice staying through difficulty.
Individual optimization replaced group investment.
Success is often treated as a solo project: optimize yourself, remove friction, keep your options open, personalize everything, and leave what no longer fits. That advice can help a consumer and hurt a group.
Important information stays unspoken.
The idea that would change a decision can stay locked in someone’s head. A problem everyone can feel may never get named.
AI raises the value of coordination.
AI makes competent individual output easier to produce. As that output becomes more common, organizations have more reason to care how well people surface what is true, think together, and decide.
Why the Usual Fixes Miss
We reach first for better hiring, faster exits, another alignment workshop, or a redesigned org chart. Each move rests on the assumption that the group will take care of itself once the right individuals are in the right seats.
It doesn’t.
People stay silent after seeing someone who pushed back get sidelined.
Information that would change a decision stays inside someone’s head.
Everyone knows about a problem, but nobody names it.
For many adults, work is one of the few structures that puts them in sustained contact with people they didn’t choose.
I study what helps a group build trust, surface the truth, and become worth staying for.
The diagnosis comes first.