Creating Tribal Value

// March 29th, 2010 // Employment Branding, Internal Communications

Paul Jacobs wrote about epic wins this week in a thought-provoking blog post that links gaming, the most immersive artificial experience currently available, to the industry of talent and service. This got me thinking about what the epic win represents to the individual, and how we can emulate that feeling when it comes to work. How can we deliver epic wins?

(I’ll preface this by pointing out that I am a gamer, albeit casually. So my insights into gaming as a subculture are driven largely by my own participation in gaming. )

Where gaming becomes essentially a tribe (by which I mean a subculture with a communal interest, language and standard of value) is when shared exposure to a particular experience becomes a unifying factor. Gamers become members of factions within their tribe that revolve around genres, platforms, styles, social connections and more. There’s occasionally some tribal warfare among these smaller groups (PC vs console, X360 vs PS3, etc) but they are still all gamers. Their membership to a self-selected class of people becomes part of their identity. They actively seek out discussion on their areas of interest. They recognise each other through a shared cultural language and, occasionally, uniform.

How do gamers get wins? Achievement. Achievement over universal expectation, set by the industry. Beating a game universally acknowledged as difficult creates prestige and personal value. Winning a gaming competition against skilled players builds reputation. The community defines its own champions against the standard set by programmers and the average experience curve. In short, the continued standard of value grows organically, as more games, more gamers and a constantly shifting standard of ‘average’ skill contribute to an overall perception.

Tribal values are community driven. They are set by adherence to a shared evaluation of what constitutes average. So creating wins is about having a communal set expectation of ‘ordinary’ so that ‘extraordinary’ is easily recognisable. You can’t overstep the mark without knowing where the mark is, and you can’t add value without knowing the difference between what is extra and what’s just service. So setting the average expectation is key.

Encouraging wins from a community perspective is the other side of the coin. Enhancing a culture which celebrates individual achievement against an accepted norm creates competition, not against each other, but against the standard. In golf, this is referred to as ‘playing against the course’. Set a ‘par’ performance on a particular task (which is essentially average expectation) and people will try to beat it for a self-perceived pay-off. If you have a culture which celebrates wins, and confers an objective, external benefit which supplements the individual’s sense of achievement, you create two connections. You connect achievement with external recognition, and you connect individual standard of value with recognised norms.

Stimulating tribal values allows us to create a framework to evaluate success. Connecting individual perception of above-average performance with recognisable reward builds community. The epic win pays off; in higher engagement with the community, in improved performance against the average, and in emotional reinvestment from the employee.

How can you change your culture to encourage epic wins?