Tribalism

In-group favouritism and out-group hostility. We evolved in tribes; us vs them is default. The brain doesn't need a reason to form a tribe. It needs a label. Tajfel proved this with schoolboys sorted by trivial art preferences — the "Klee group" and "Kandinsky group" favoured their own and discriminated against the other within minutes. The groups had no history. No competition for resources. The only variable was categorisation itself.

In business: company tribalism (we're the good guys), industry tribalism (tech vs finance), team tribalism (engineering vs sales). Tribalism enables coordination within the tribe but blinds us to out-group merit. The engineers dismiss Sales as "people who don't understand the product." Sales dismisses Engineering as "people who don't understand the customer." Both are tribal. The merit on the other side is invisible.

The antidote: superordinate goals that require cross-tribe cooperation. When engineering and sales must jointly deliver a customer outcome, the tribal boundary weakens. Amazon's "disagree and commit" — we're one tribe, but we argue. Bridgewater's "radical transparency" — reduce tribal information asymmetry so that status within the tribe doesn't determine who gets heard. The structure determines whether tribalism helps or harms.

The commercial applications are enormous. Salesforce built "Ohana" — the Hawaiian word for family — as the organising metaphor for its culture and customer community. CrossFit turned a fitness regimen into a tribal identity so powerful that members tattooed the logo on their bodies. Harley-Davidson riders don't buy a motorcycle — they join a brotherhood. The power: tribalism creates loyalty beyond reason. The danger: tribalism creates blind spots. The same mechanism that makes CrossFit members evangelical makes them ignore injury data. Tribalism is a double-edged weapon. The strategic move is to build a tribe — and install guardrails against its pathologies.