Scenes, cliques and teams - a high level ontology of groups

[-]sarahconstantin2mo*182

I like this article, but I think I sort of "don't believe in scenes", or believe they're inherently sort of disappointing or contain a kind of tension.

A team has a goal orientation and some kind of merit-related criterion of membership (can you contribute?)

A clique can openly be arranged for the benefit of its members. There's nothing "unfair" or "nepotistic" about prioritizing your family, your friend group, a social club with formal membership like the Elks, or a subculture like the Juggalos. The right answer to "What makes your clique better than anybody else, such that you should spend your time and effort on them?" is "nothing! i love it because it is mine. it suits me. something else might suit you."

A scene is neither merit-based nor inward-looking. It's sort of making a promise to collectively pursue the Art, but it also can't really kick you out if you suck at the Art. It hasn't committed to a membership boundary (like a clique, which exists for the benefit of these specific people) or an effectiveness boundary (like a team, which exists to get a specific thing done). It's not willing to own its ruthlessness (like a team) or its self-servingness (like a clique). At best it's fertile ground for building real teams and cliques. At worst, it seems to promise mutual support and progress towards common goals, but lots of people are going to be disappointed that they can't count on that support or that progress actually materializing.

For instance, I think there are a lot of individual people in the LessWrong community I'd want to be on a team with because I respect them on merit-based grounds. I also have affection and loyalty to the community as a clique, as a place I feel at home, a subculture I'm fond of, a group with a high density of personal friends, regardless of whether it's objectively "better" than any other community. But I don't actually think community membership is evidence of merit. I think that sort of self-flattering narrative is built into the "scene" format and that people who critique it have a point.

[-]Gordon Seidoh Worley2mo132

I like this. I notice you don't mention religion in this post, but I think one of the things religions do really well is try to provide access to all three of a scene, a clique, and a team at the same time (though I wouldn't have known to put it this way before reading your post!).

Why I say this:

A "church" (a term I'm using loosely here to mean both the place in which people practice a religion, the people who practice that religion in that place, and the organizational entity which organizes these two and interfaces with the secular legal system) is at its most basic level a team: some people come together to make religion practice happen at a specific place and time.
It's also a source of cliques. A church if often too large for all its members to be in a single clique, but it creates an environment with shared experiences upon which cliques can form (and formation is often aided by participation in the team aspect of a church).
A church is a scene in that it's part of the larger goal of the religion. People often first join a church because they want to be part of the scene, and know nothing about the clique or team aspect. They then get to be part of the collective process of figuring out how to practice the religion in the modern world (which may or may not include things like evangelizing).

I've previously made a case that rationalists should be more religious, and being able to talk in more detailed terms about what the community benefits offered by religions are is helpful!

[-]CstineSublime2mo30

Could you elucidate some use cases where you think this could be useful? I'm just finding it very hard to note where the distinctions between the three is needed and not. Like you say a relationship is part of a clique, so if a husband and wife spend an afternoon shopping for a new washing machine - then they are both a Clique and a Team, right? Since streamlining their laundry is their shared goal. Once they buy a machine, I assume that team-washing-machine ceases to be, but their relationship remains^[1], which is a clique.

A writing club where members gather to share and critique each other’s work.

Why is this a Scene but not a team? "Critique" could be a shared goal. "Sharing" too. I wonder how much this ontology shifts the burn onto an ontology of tasks/projects? Or does each individual meeting of a scene constitute a time-bound team but the scene is of indefinite length?

^{^}
The scenario-ist/dramatist in me could imagine a short film where a simple quest to buy a washing machine reveals the wider problems in communication and values and ultimately is the death knell of a marriage in a "this really isn't about a washing machine, this is about the compromises we make for each other's life decisions" kind of way. Cue the awkward down on his luck Jack Lemmon/Gil Gunderson salesman trying to ignore their drama and make the sale he's desperate for.

[-]Rana Dexsin2mo*30

Why is this a Scene but not a team? "Critique" could be a shared goal. "Sharing" too.

I think the conflict would be where the OP describes a Team's goal as “shared and specific”. The critiques and sharing in the average writing club are mostly instrumental, feeding into a broader and more diffuse pattern. Each critique helps improve that writer's writing; each one-to-one instance of sharing helps mediate the influence of that writer and the frames of that reader; each writer may have goals like improving, becoming more prolific, or becoming popular, but the conjunction of all their goals forms more of a heap than a solid object; there's also no defined end state that everyone can agree on. There's one-to-many and many-to-many cross-linkages in goal structure, but there's still fluidity and independence that central examples of Team don't have.

I would construct some differential examples thus—all within my own understanding of the framework, of course, not necessarily OP's:

In Alien Writing Club, the members gather to share and critique each other's work—but not for purposes established by the individual writers, like ways they want to improve. They believe the sharing of writing and delivery of critiques is a quasi-religious end in itself, measured in the number of words exchanged, which is displayed on prominent counter boards in the club room. When one of the aliens is considering what kind of writing to produce and bring, their main thoughts are of how many words they can expand it to and how many words of solid critique they can get it to generate to make the numbers go up even higher. Alien Writing Club is primarily a Team, though with some Scenelike elements both due to fluid entry/exit and due to the relative independence of linkages from each input to the counters.
In Collaborative Franchise Writing Corp, the members gather to share and critique each other's work—in order to integrate these works into a coherent shared universe. Each work usually has a single author, but they have formed a corporation structured as a cooperative to manage selling the works and distributing the profits among the writers, with a minimal support group attached (say, one manager who farms out all the typesetting and promotion and stuff to external agencies). Each writer may still want to become skilled, famous, etc. and may still derive value from that individually, and the profit split is not uniform, but while they're together, they focus on improving their writing in ways that will cause the shared universe to be more compelling to fans and hopefully raise everyone's revenues in the process, as well as communicating and negotiating over important continuity details. Collaborative Franchise Writing Corp is primarily a Team.
SCP is primarily a Scene with some Teamlike elements. It's part of the way from Writing Club to Collaborative Franchise Writing Corp, but with a higher flux of users and a lower tightness of coordination and continuity, so it doesn't cross the line from “focused Scene” to “loosely coupled Team”.
A less directly related example that felt interesting to include: Hololive is primarily a Team for reasons similar to Collaborative Franchise Writing Corp, even though individual talents have a lot of autonomy in what they produce and whom they collaborate with. It also winds up with substantial Cliquelike elements due to the way the personalities interact along the way, most prominently in smaller subgroups. VTubers in the broad are a Scene that can contain both Cliques and Teams. I would expect Clique/Team fluidity to be unusually high in “personality-focused entertainer”-type Scenes, because “personality is a key part of the product” causes “liking and relating to each other” and “producing specific good things by working together” to overlap in a very direct way that isn't the case in general.

(I'd be interested to have the OP's Zendo-like marking of how much their mental image matches each of these!)

Some mistakes and hard-earned takes

I hope the above is valuable to you. My core take is that identifying what you are part of, or trying to build, should influence how you choose to build, lead, participate in a community.

That said, here are some more specific mistakes I and others I know have made, and the (more tentative) takes that have resulted from those past mistakes.

Mistake 1: Being too democratic, too early, in scenes

Scenes grow and persist when they have teams that steward them (i.e. a subset of the group with a shared goal of supporting the scene)

Unlike cliques or teams, folk are usually not very emotionally or financially dependent on scenes (especially early on, when no cliques have developed in the scene). This means the risks of having a highly empowered leader or leadership team is low. People can just leave.

The main risk to a scene is lack of leadership, or a drop in leadership energy or motivation. This might just be fine, nothing lasts forever, but I’ve tried and failed to build scenes in the past through lack of prioritising my own vision and interest as a leader.

Sensitive leadership - i.e. establishing and meeting the needs of people in the group is obviously still very good, even if you others aren’t directly empowered.

Having a strong lean towards meeting the needs of more central, regular group members here is also super important - I’ve seen scene leaders do this explicitly (e.g. prioritising the needs of people who’ve been to X events over those that have been to fewer) and this seems very good for scene health (though some folk will complain).

The flip side of this, being too hierarchical or dictatorial in cliques also seems bad.

Mistake 2: Trying to get a sense of belonging from a scene (or mistaking a scene for a clique)

Scenes are generally more brittle and have more instrumentality than cliques. A scene is less intrinsically valuable than a clique and if the scene didn’t exist, folk would just do something else.

Scenes do produce cliques, and a whole scene might transition into a clique (e.g. your film watching group stops being about the films after a few months and you just start hanging out).

Though worse than cliques, teams are a better place to get belonging than scenes. But since that belonging will often be based on your instrumental value to the shared mission (e.g. you get to belong in your company because of your spreadsheet skills), it seems like a relatively precarious and limited place to meet this need.

I definitely did this with the EA community when I first got involved. This was understandable as I had moved to a new city and didn’t have much belonging in my life, but made me quite neurotic about the scene for a while…

Mistake 3: Not setting clear boundaries in cliques (mistaking a clique for a scene)

The boundary is one of the most important elements of a clique - many have natural boundaries (e.g. families, or homes). Creating common knowledge about boundaries and respecting them seems neglected in many cliques.

E.g. Bill letting his new boyfriend join your weekly hang is a thing it’s very reasonable to be very careful about. Lack of intentionality in clique boundary crossing erodes belonging.

I love opening circles at events and think they are extremely powerful for this reason - when everyone can see everyone seeing everyone, you create common knowledge of who is and isn’t in the group - this build belonging, especially when the circle also clarifies and emphasises the shared reason for being there.

Mistake 4: Treating a scene like a team

Teams require a lot of buy-in, trust, communication and a clear shared vision on what is being achieved. Scenes are usually more fluid, opt-in, and porous. You can create a scene that tries to achieve things collectively (e.g. hackathons often feel like this), but in my experience, the friends (cliques), skills, and experiences made along the way are much more valuable than the tangible output of goal-oriented scene-building.

This is true of EA - Occasionally I see people framing the whole scene as having a shared mission (less suffering or something) which I think is not 100% false, but feels like a disorientating frame to me, and implies a greater need for buy in, trust and mutual dependence than a scene can realistically hold.

Mistake 5: Trying to force a clique

Most folk make friends at school or work for a reason - you have a clear reason to be together that allows trust to be built and relationship tested over time. It’s hard to force this.

If you’re trying to build a clique, you’ll want to go slowly. Cliques meet some of the deepest psychological needs in our biology and some of the least met needs in our culture (love, belonging). They trigger everyone’s attachment wounds.

Consider starting, or joining, a scene first - allow folk to spend time with each other in a lower pressure environment.

(Something in here is at the core of why I found internet dating unpleasant, and imagine others do too - you’re trying to start a very important clique from scratch…)

Some final points

“Reality doesn’t come in categories” - individual groups often contain elements of multiple types. A group might be both a scene, and a clique (though it’s still valuable to know how much of dynamic is present and which flavour is most dominant)

“Everything comes from everything else” - groups of people are fractal. With groups within groups within groups - A team might house a scene, which in turn can foster a clique, and vice versa.

The best events know what type of community they are cultivating. Every event is about the cultivation of some kind of group. Sometimes this is ephemeral, and just about the time at the event. But the most important events I’ve been part of, transform the shape of the group beyond their start and end time. Knowing what flavour of group the event is supporting is therefore crucial.

This framework has become really helpful for me in talking about community building and events. It helps clarify what I’m doing. I also think it might be really helpful for making sense of the communities that you’re in, and identifying failures in leadership.

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Scenes, cliques and teams - a high level ontology of groups

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What is a scene?

What is a clique?

What is a team?

Some mistakes and hard-earned takes

Some final points