Once there are successful teams of five familiar with collaborating that have developed basic skill sets it is far easier to identify twelve with the maturity of dispositions to work collectively.

I don’t start from scratch with the teams of five, either. I hand select them based on their having accomplished a certain level of clarity in what they have achieved thus far and ideally from those who have chosen to be dofollow CommentLuv bloggers because that is a strong indication of a pay-it-forward rather than selfish mentality.

A: You create your own levels.

POINT: Raving fans model is unbelievable.

TRUE, because YOUR target audience (and mine) is NOT the “unthinking bleating-sheep” – it is the minority population of true thinkers.

The Tribe proponents want to be the worshipped so they can lead their marks to their own benefit. They often refer to these marks as sheep – which I find particularly annoying as that is a slam against those of us who choose to be the sheep of Jesus and follow no one else.

Here is what IMHO all of these are missing. The point of the 12 is NOT “innovation by committee” – it is to put together a collaboration of 12 innovators with different talents who share their innovations and collectively create a better world using them.

These 12 can then start additional groups of twelve and transfer the wisdom of the original group to additional “leaders” – for want of a better term – so that the better world they envision can be created bottom up and overcome all oppressors.

I disagree that these participants must be “fiercely contentious and competitive collaborators who at least partly hate the fact that they need the others, but grudgingly admire skills besides their own”. WHY should they be? That is an ego problem unnecessary to perpetuate.

Competition creates losers and is unnecessary. There is always room “at the top” for more winners because instead of fighting over a very limited pie they can simply create a larger pie!

You only need 12 because most people prefer to be followers, content to lurk, and we can give them a better path to follow than the wolves in sheep’s clothing targeting them as marks.

You don’t “exit the dream team level” so you can have it all selfishly – you stay a part of the ever-growing collaboration that is building a better world.

I define that “better world” as a world in which competition is unnecessary and every person everywhere has a decent standard of living and interesting things to do – where people do what they love and focus on what is important in life – where they do NOT worship money or power (or their foolish selves) as their god.

Collaborations of bloggers who create group geo-targeted niche blogs read by the masses of followers are the solution to impending economic collapse and environmental nightmares. Of course it may be too late – given the damage humans have done to this planet – but at least those who participate will recognize the purpose of life and be prepared.

However, except when I work on my own teams (my hobby is rebuilding downtrodden houses), the project management (I am an SAP integration consultant) typically breaks these (tiger?) teams into smaller teams with the self-fulfillment that the smaller teams fail to deliver on the schedules being met by the tiger teams. Thanks for “The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk” it provides an interesting explanation to this loser/sociopath.

I have been thinking about the ‘how’ since I wrote this piece (yet another imperfect word…) and have reached some tentative conclusions but am still figuring out how to present them.

An earlier unsatisfactory stab at the ‘how’ was in The Tragedy of Wiio’s Law, but that was something of a sideways glance at this question.

And am honored to be your ‘new favorite blog’

@Venkat: I started following with the surge from Slashdot surrounding the “Gervais Principle” post, and you’re my new favorite blog.

*what is the term for a single entry in a blog anyway? “post” seems to get used but seems inadequate for the more substantial works, “article” has an air of “print publication”, “essay” as I used also seems somewhat off as it suggests academia, etc…

Your example: I suspect the 30 may have broken down informally into smaller cliques within the Super-30. I took the same exam, and curiously, 11 out of my class of around 40 made it

Venkat

Pre-beta or not, this article is very fruitful stuff. Hope you’ll continue to think out loud on this subject.

You got your precis basically right, except I think that all 12 contribute individual creative sparks. The heyday of PARC was a great example of crucible (Alan Kay: programming languages and UI metaphors, Simonyi: application s/w, Butler Lampson: micro-scale hardware,…). Another was the polish school of mathematics (Ulam, Banach…). Toronto at one point had an unusually fertile literary scene.

So scenes with just 1 idea guy rarely play out well for long.

So what are you saying? That economics is driven by free-market allocation of the scarcest resource of attention, grabbed by creative groups of optimal size of around 12 that collaborate to develop a brilliant spark coming from a single individual mind, each of whom appeals to about 150 so that the group attracts 1,000? Okay…

I guess outfits like partnerup.com are trying to do something like that. But I think the need for collective attention allocation mechanisms precedes goal-formation. Services inspired by job and dating markets are too goal-oriented I think. Especially true for post-disciplinary crucibles; table-tennis leagues already function well. It is the creation of things like the Vienna Circle say, that is the scarcity challenge.

Maybe we need to steal the algorithms used by dating sites?