# The Social Suite When you're working in any organization, it's easy to believe that its structure, strategy, processes, and practices are all built and maintained by conscious human intention. People, after all, founded the organization toward some common purpose. They made decisions about why to work, how to work, and where to work. Along the way, they created policies and practices to guide that work – from job titles, to job functions, to operating practices, and beyond. All of these appeared to be conscious, explicit, and intentional. And yet, organizations are built upon a deeper truth about human evolution: Banding together is a biological feature of our species. It is buried deep in our DNA. As Nicholas Christakis writes in his book, [*Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society](https://www.worldcat.org/title/blueprint-the-evolutionary-origins-of-a-good-society/oclc/1143317889&referer=brief_results)*: > "…like other behaviors that have helped our species to survive and reproduce, the human ability to construct societies has become an instinct. It is not just something we *can* do – it is something we *must* do." Any organization, and any society, is therefore built on the substrate of invisible, intractible, biological impulses of our species to live and work in groups. Of course, the learned and experienced culture of any society builds upon that substrate – which is why people gathering in one country or culture will think and work in quite different ways than those in another (for examples, see [Hofstede 2010](https://www.worldcat.org/title/cultures-and-organizations-software-of-the-mind/oclc/619897998&referer=brief_results)). But beneath the culture lives a wide array of human evolutionary tendencies that shape how we work together. Christakis suggests eight components of this "social suite" of evolved tendendencies: - **The capacity to have and recognize individual identity**: "provides a foundation for love, friendship, and cooperation, allowing people to track who is who across time and place, and to faithfully repay kindness offered by others." - **Love for partners and offspring**: "a particularly distinctive human experience (built on a trait seen in only a few other mammals, namely, the practice of bonding with mates)." - **Friendship**: "We form long-term, nonreproductive unions with other humans. This is exceedingly rare in the animal kingdom, but is universal in us." - **Social networks**: "As a consequence of having friends, we assemble ourselves into social networks, and here, too, the particular ways we do this are universal. The mathematical patterns of friendship are the same around the world." - **Cooperation**: "Humans everywhere also coorporate with one another…we reliably interact with friends rather than strangers within the face-to-face networks we fashion…" - **Preference for one's own group ("in-group bias")**: "…we form groups whose boundaries we reinforce by coming to like those within the group more than those outside of it. People everywhere choose their friends and prefer their own groups." - **Social learning and teaching**: "No human has to learn everything on [their] own; we can all rely on others to teach us, a hugely efficient practice present in all cultures" The idea of an evolutionary social suite does NOT mean we humans have no control over how, when, or why we gather. Rather, it suggests that whenever we gather, our behaviors are informed by a full range of factors, including conscious attention, convention, culture, and biology. If you only focus on the conscious components of an arts organization, you'll be missing most of the iceburg. This framework is particularly useful when considering [[People Operations]] and [[Governance]]. --- ## Source - Christakis, Nicholas A. [*Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society*](https://www.worldcat.org/title/blueprint-the-evolutionary-origins-of-a-good-society/oclc/1143317889&referer=brief_results). Little, Brown Spark, 2019. ## Tags (click to view related pages) #substrate #functions/people_operations #functions/governance #sapling