How Groups Change

Groups form for a mission. People come together to solve a problem, ship a product, fight a cause. At some point, the mission ends. The goal is reached, the idea is proven wrong, or it is forgotten. The group itself continues. It self-preserves.

Identity, belonging, sunk costs and exit costs are forces that hold a group together. They are what a group runs on after a mission has ended. Perhaps you like building software in Go so much that it is part of who you are. Perhaps you like the people in the Node community. Perhaps you have been so vocal about Rust being a superior language, and doing something else would mean facing a different truth.

Some groups stay porous. No single group owns your identity, so none of them can hold you by threatening it. You're a Go developer and also a Python developer and also a parent and also in a climbing gym. You don't have to believe the whole package. You can like Go and think its error handling is bad. Porous groups tolerate partial, conditional, even grumbling membership. Because you stand in several groups at once, you can always see each one from the others.

Some groups become routines. The process becomes the reason for them to persist. An architecture review board gets created to stop a specific kind of outage. Incidents become less because the group is doing useful work. The board still meets every Thursday. The momentum of the structure drives the group forward. The routine is comfortable. There is a rhythm to it, a fixed hour, a familiar room, a role each person knows how to play.

Some groups become zombies. The group's survival becomes the unstated mission. A team might have formed to do a complex migration. After the migration is done, it would make sense for the group to disband. Disbanding feels like a loss, so the team redefines itself instead. It finds a new mandate, then another. Each one is real enough to justify the next meeting and thin enough that no one would have started a team to do it. Ending it means letting go of something people built together. So the group keeps itself alive instead, defending an existence that has run out of reasons.

Lastly, some groups close into cults. Leaving is made to cost everything: the job, the people, the years you'd have to admit were a mistake. No one designs this. It accumulates, each person a little more invested than the last, until disagreement is something the group can no longer afford to hear. Dissent gets treated as betrayal. Questioning the technical framework gets you labeled a bad culture fit. Evidence that the group is wrong is can no longer get in.

There's one move that quietly pushes a group from porous toward cult, which is a belief of being better. Crossfit people are fit and they talk about it. The polyamory community is skilled at talking about feelings. The functional-programming crowd writes code with fewer of certain kind of bugs. These traits are real. Being good at one thing is not the same as being better, and the traits are not exclusive. You can be fit without CrossFit, and talk about feelings with your friend. They don't belong to the group. Left unchecked, the difference stops being something the group does and becomes the group's identity, and that's the thing it will defend.

When the mission ends, look at what's still holding the group together. A group held because it's useful will let people go when it stops being useful to them. A group held because leaving has become unthinkable is a different thing, even if no one ever decided to make it so. The thing that keeps a group open is the connections its members keep to everything outside it. Another group, a different field, a person who can safely disagree. Keep a place to stand where groups don't reach, and step back to it often enough to see the shape of what you're in.