The World In Small Groups
Not too long ago I had what I call a “They Live moment”. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the film, They Live is a John Carpenter movie from 1988 featuring the wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper. Aliens have invaded Earth and are walking amongst us, disguised as humans; they are, in fact, members of the ruling class who deploy subliminal messages on major media to compel us to consume products and conform while they transform the Earth through Global Warming to be more hospitable to their species. Roddy Piper’s character discovers special sunglasses that allow him to see the Aliens’ human disguises and joins the anti-Alien resistance.
About a year ago, I started looking back at all of my favorite, most prized experiences that I either produced, attended or participated in over the past 30+ years. I tried to figure out what connected them. I realized that they were all small-to-mid-size experiences with specific groups of people in specific places at specific times. Once I noticed that, I couldn’t stop noticing small groups as an organizing principle for society.
Everywhere I looked I saw how creative trends, social movements and cultural changes originate in small groups — the Beat writers, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Merry Pranksters, XEROX PARC, to name a very few — and that most of our human stories are organized around small groups as well.
Just the other night I was watching Shogun and started thinking about how this story of vast social, political change, shifts in global trade, religion and conflict, is told through the stories of a small group of people. Small groups are how humans work best, looking at small groups is how we best assimilate information and understand the wider world. The small group experience is where culture is incubated and created and change happens — mass media is about dissemination.
It is the small spaces, small groups, where we are safe to explore, experiment, try out new ideas and risk failure, where we gather with people of like mind, though maybe of differing opinions, to work out ideas and practice collaboration; these are the spaces where culture is actually created. This is where we have formative experiences, where we are most open to possibility and change. And if this is where culture, connection and creativity are forged, then everything else is just dissemination. Scale is about replication, distribution and dissemination, not quality or impact.
And as it became clear to me that small groups are the essential building blocks for transformative experiences, creativity and social cohesion, it became equally clear that the dominant narratives around creative success, impact and sociocultural identities were about large groups and mass experiences.
Living in Los Angeles, and before that in NYC, always adjacent to the media and tech industries, one can’t help but absorb the language and frameworks of mass media, particularly when talking about creativity and new venture creation. The Pitch Deck Start-Up mentality always starts with “What problem are you trying to solve” and quickly moves to “How are you going to get it to scale?”. I’ve felt that I was driving myself crazy trying to make things scale that just, by definition, don’t scale. And shouldn’t scale.
America loves to go big. The Super Bowl. Blockbuster Hollywood Movies. Best-selling books, #1 Hits and must-watch TV, political rallies and megachurches, Taylor Swift and Beyonce concerts. When we talk about culture, influence and impact the dominant mass media narrative goes right to the big numbers. There’s an underlying — and largely unquestioned — assumption that significant impact, real change, is only achieved at scale, when something gets really, really big.
But take a moment to think about what happened at that Taylor Swift concert. You might not even be able to remember it that well. It’s not that the concert wasn’t amazing, or that the experience wasn’t ecstatic; it’s that you are just as likely, over the long term, to remember the 5 or 6 friends you went with, what happened beforehand and after. The real story of that concert is your story of that concert.
In some ways, this is not some earth-shattering revelation — marketers have been thinking about small groups since at least the advent of Tupperware Parties. A friend of mine who is a senior executive in the video game industry has told me about how they think about the role of small groups (around 25) in building engagement and social cohesion in massive-multiplayer games.
Conventional, market-driven thinking encourages us to think about how a show, an event, an experience, can get as big as possible, make as much money as possible, become a cultural phenomenon. But what if that thinking is just wrong? The market drives us to think about scale, humanity keeps us focused on small groups. All the best stuff happens when things are still small, when people can interact in-person, co-creating in real time with each other, learning from each other, trying things out, risking failure and sharing in success.
When I teach creative producing, one of the images I use is growing tomatoes — that you need to have good soil and a trellis to support the vines growing up, reaching toward the sun, to grow the tomatoes. Sometimes, as creative professionals, we’re the tomato, sometimes we’re the vine and sometimes we’re the trellis-builders, helping to create the infrastructure and support systems for the plants to flourish and grow.
In the creative and cultural space, we spend so much time focusing on the tomato that we too often lose sight of the necessity for soil and trellis. (I know I’m really abusing this metaphor here).
So, what I’m proposing is to really shift focus, to resist the “how does it scale” conversation entirely, and re-frame our emphasis on scale to put in-person, transformative, small group experiences at the center of our thinking around cultural production.
The next, and final, essay in this series will recap some of the conditions and characteristics of live, in-person, small group experiences that make them uniquely powerful and transformative. Stay tuned!
This essay was originally published on Culturebot.org.
