# How small social groups have purpose

We all want to [connect](hardship-friends.md) with others, which requires us to [feel](mind-feelings.md) their presence. Because of this, people typically find comfort in a few personal connections more than many broad connections. We can maintain a family-like experience in groups until about 5-20 close connections.

Once a group grows larger than about 20-50 people, it becomes a [large group](groups-large.md) that [identifies](identity.md) with a particular [name](language.md). But, within that group, it'll often splinter into small subgroups based on preference, leadership decisions, and [specialized purposes](jobs-specialization.md).

## Value

A group is a human value. Beyond our [interpretations](values.md), groups don't technically exist. We define "groups" to easily [demarcate](logic.md) between things to make reasonable [decisions](decisions.md), but they're the expressed [value](values.md) of one person with people who [agree](people-contracts.md) with that value.

Frequently, people [creating](creations.md) or [believing](understanding-certainty.md) something will band together over the same [purpose](purpose.md).

Since they have many [perspectives](image.md) and many [varieties of power](power-types.md), a small crowd who is sufficiently [motivated](purpose.md) will *always* defeat an individual in absolutely any comparison whatsoever, even on matters of intelligence or [understanding](understanding.md).

Usually, everyone appoints someone as a leader by merit of a few possible routes, based on the [values](values.md) the group holds, then forms a hierarchy below that leader based on the merit they've selected:

1. Whoever is [the oldest](maturity.md) in that group.
2. The person who [appears](image.md) most capable to make [decisions](decisions.md).
3. The member most [passionate](mind-feelings.md) about the subject.
4. The member that most [desires](purpose.md) [power](power.md) over everyone else.
5. Whoever has the most time to devote to the group or a task.

While a group holds together by shared values, we can often forget that individual [priorities](purpose.md) change. Thus, while we can use groups to precisely distinguish things as they are or were, [predictions](imagination.md) are never very accurate.

## Magnified purpose

One of the most practical effects of leadership comes through everyone's magnification of their [purpose](purpose.md). The leader's purpose is naturally magnified by other members acting as an extension of their will, but lower-ranking members' purposes are also magnified, at least proportionally to the leadership's willingness and ability to grant [power](power.md) to them.

Members always have at least some [power](power.md) in the group. In the case of a [low power distance](culture.md) group (e.g., a club), everyone shares resources to pursue their own unique [purposes](purpose.md). In groups with high power distance (e.g., a [cult](culture-cults.md)), the power funnels upward to the leader, and all the members [believe](understanding-certainty.md) in the group's collective [purposes](purpose.md).

Each member has at least some [power](power.md), [purpose](purpose.md), and [beliefs](understanding-certainty.md) from their group, so it's far harder to [influence](power-influence.md) anyone while they're in a group to new ideas *outside* the group than if they had discovered those [values](values.md) separately.

## Leading

[Leadership](mgmt-1_why.md) is nothing more than [making decisions](decisions.md) that affect a group.

People tend to give power to leaders proportional to how much they [trust](trust.md) that leader's decisions over their own. That trust comes from how much [power](power.md) they [see](image.md) from the leader and how much they [trust](trust.md) that leader to stay [moral](morality.md). This trust comes from how the information they [*don't* know](unknown.md) about other things, time constraints, and [how much they like](people-4_friends.md) the other group members.

The increased [order](unknown.md) necessary for a leader to make systems, structure, and [rules](rules.md) almost guarantees that they'll lean more into high conscientiousness.

The values of a group are mostly defined by its leadership. That leader is approving or denying members' [creations](creations.md) to promote the [values](values.md) they [want](purpose.md) to see. Leadership ends up looking like [parenting](people-family.md), but typically with a more subdued and distanced approach.

Broadly, leaders tend to exert control across a [culture](culture.md), with a spectrum ranging on how much they employ [feelings](mind-feelings.md) about the past:

1. [Honor/Shame](mind-feelings-shame.md) - emphasis on honoring [rules](rules.md) through plenty of shame, keeps society in the highest state of [order](understanding-certainty.md) at the expense of sabotaging [large-scale trends](trends.md), more prevalent in Eastern cultures.
2. Innocence/Guilt - the shame is localized to the emotion of guilt, meaning there's a binary action or inaction toward the rules, but not necessarily toward long-past events, more prevalent in Western cultures.
3. Correct/Incorrect - there is no emotional guilt or shame attached and only a focus on what is factual, magnifies the most [innovation](mind-creativity.md) and [technological](technology.md) development, but only prevalent within outliers of society.

One of a leader's most critical decisions involves how the group's [image](image.md) appears to those outside of the group. Generally, the image must appear immaculate (or at least good enough) to gain approval enough for the group to grow. That image is typically a response to how the most extreme members of a group interact with outsiders.

When confronting [evil](morality-evil.md) inside a group, leaders are at a tremendous disadvantage. ~95% of the members are well-intended and do largely good or benign self-interested things, but a statistically insignificant minority create *severe* damage to a group when they have the opportunity. The leadership often [trusts](trust.md) members out of necessity, and therefore will have limited capacity to react. To offset this, they'll typically [trend](trends.md) toward managing a "core group" within the larger group over time, and it will only get worse as the [organization scales](groups-large.md) until the group has at least two distinctive [social classes](classes.md).

In most groups, the various [forms of power](power-types.md) grant different types of leadership to various members. There's a significant difference between a [natural specialty](jobs-specialization.md) and [personality](personality.md) that creates different types of [value](values-quality.md), versus conveying that value to others, and at least a few archetypes typically arise through different members:

1. Social leadership - usually the [connections](people-4_friends.md) inside the group.
2. Thought leadership - has the most [understanding](understanding.md) of many specific matters in the group.
3. [Image](image.md) leadership - has the most connections with people outside the group.
4. [Creative](mind-creativity.md) leadership - has the most understanding of things outside the group to draw inspiration from.
5. Fanatical leadership - the strongest [believer](understanding-certainty.md) in the group and its [purposes](purpose.md) (often verging on [religious obsession](religion.md)).

Some leaders will have a "celebrity" [persona](stories-myths.md), while others will be highly competent. In a [severe crisis](people-conflicts-war.md), the competent leaders determine the core capacity of the group, but the celebrities determine its [morale](meaning.md) and [public image](image.md).

When a leader doesn't do much, they're merely a [symbol](symbols.md). Symbolic leadership is frequently common when groups value [individual freedom](people-boundaries.md), are [incompetent](mgmt-badsystems.md), or are [too large](groups-large.md) for the leader to make individual [decisions](decisions.md).

If any leaders develop differing [purposes](purpose.md), they'll usually have a [conflict](people-conflicts.md) among each other. In that situation, if there isn't enough [love](people-love.md) for each other, the group itself will likely split with at least two camps led by those two leaders as a representation of differing [opinions](values.md).

## Delegating power

Leaders dictate values by distributing [power](power.md). They can either let people pursue their [purposes](purpose.md) (and therefore make *those* people a type of leader, of themselves or the group) or redirect that power (often upward) for the perceived benefit of the group.

Good leaders will push members toward other members' [purposes](purpose.md), at least the ones that align with the group's best interests. Many times, members will have [fears](mind-feelings-fear.md) and [uncertainties](understanding-certainty.md) that prevent them from acting on things they ought to do, and excellent leaders remove that uncertainty by reinforcing the members' [understanding](understanding.md) of an "outside" influence.

Bad leaders create [conflicts](people-conflicts.md). Conflicts are inevitably one-on-one, and a leader's decisions will typically favor some people. But, favor to one side will naturally discredit the opposing side. There are many variables to consider, so the only way a leader can know which person to promote comes strictly from [experience](maturity.md) combined with [wisdom](understanding.md).

Good leaders *also* create [conflicts](people-conflicts.md). Usually, they're antagonizing existing conflicts members may have wanted to avoid, and they do it because they [understand](understanding.md) that avoiding conflicts erodes members' [trust](trust.md) in one another. But, they [can successfully navigate to a "third option"](people-5_conflicts.md) by recalling other personal conflicts in the past.

## Results

A leader promotes certain [values](values.md) almost automatically, so a group will recreate itself to the [image](image.md) the leader [communicates](people-conversation.md). In other words, a group is the [creative](mind-creativity.md) result of the leader's ability to communicate beliefs.

In the case of skillful leadership, a group will closely match what the leader desires. As a group draws closer to the leader's ideal, the *members* will either strip other members of their power or promote them. Eventually, everyone in leadership will become *very* similar to the leader, assuming an outside force (e.g., [death](legacy.md)) doesn't redefine the leader.

The general success or failure of a group's values come in its [results](results.md). Many leaders are [evil](morality-evil.md) enough to [distort reality](image-distortion.md), but their success is usually easy enough to compare [numerically](math.md) in a broad sense (e.g., voters, employees, volunteers, members, congregants, etc.).

However, there's plenty of uncertainty from a leader's [thought](mind-creativity.md) to the organization's [results](results.md), so measurements can be misleading:

1. The leader [decides](decisions.md).
2. The leader [communicates](people-conversation.md) that decision, with possible interference or additions by the leader's choice of [media](stories-storytellers.md) and other leaders conveying the thought.
3. The members who end up performing either add or remove the [quality](values-quality.md) of the results, based on their [competence](understanding.md) and [purposes](purpose.md).

## Never wrong

It's important to note that groups (especially the leadership) will *never* openly admit they're presently doing something wrong. Instead, incorrect [decisions](decisions.md) and [beliefs](understanding-certainty.md) will only create several possible results:

1. [Morally equivocate](morality.md) what they do as being as good or better than other groups.
2. Eject the leader and blame everything on that leader, with the group openly confessing they *were* mistaken but aren't anymore.
3. The leader admits they're wrong, and the group suffers a schism and *heavily* redefined roles, which may lead to the group breaking apart entirely.
4. Behave as if they haven't done anything wrong and [attack the messenger](morality-taboo.md).

Any of the above are irrelevant to what the group actually [changes](people-changes.md) in light of what they did wrong. If leaders in the group admit they're wrong, only a few possibilities play out:

1. Quietly make the changes as inconspicuously as possible and never talk about it again.
2. If they can publicly throw all blame on former leadership (even if it was a few days), heavily [advertise](image.md) that change to create distance from it.

A group's existence is built on the environment that surrounds it. When the environment around the group changes, the group *must* conform to the new changes, or they'll become an obsolete [trend](trends.md).