complex world. If you pull one lever here, you’re probably going to produce an unexpected outcome over there. It takes the entire flock, the entire community, to map the whole system and act on all its parts in a continuous way, with continuous feedback conversations.
In a collaborative system, you set up an arrangement in which nobody is punished for an unpleasant fact. For example, many school systems use data as a way to grade schools, close schools, and get them to compete. In Spartanburg they never do that. They want all of the players in the system to be cooperating, not competing. They need to have purity of communication above all and transparency about the data. They don’t want anybody hiding data because they’re afraid of what punishments may come. They use data as a flashlight, not a hammer. This ethic of contribution (Everybody gives) and this ethic of total collaboration (We’re all responsible) is central to community work at its highest level.
THE THICKENING
On the first mountain, the emphasis is on the unencumbered self, individual accomplishment, creating a society in which everyone is free to be themselves. This is a fluid society, and over the short term a productive society, but it is a thin society. It is a society in which people are only lightly attached to each other and to their institutions. The second-mountain society is a thick society. The organizations and communities in that society leave a mark. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes an organization thick or thin.
The thick communities have a distinct culture—the way the University of Chicago, Morehouse College, the U.S. Marine Corps do. A thick institution is not trying to serve its people instrumentally, to give them a degree or to simply help them earn a salary. A thick institution seeks to change the person’s whole identity. It engages the whole person: head, hands, heart, and soul.
Thick institutions have a physical location, often cramped, where members meet face-to-face on a regular basis, such as a dinner table or a packed gym or an assembly hall. Such institutions have a set of collective rituals—fasting or reciting some creed in unison or standing in formation. They have shared tasks, which often involve members closely watching one another, the way hockey teammates have to observe one another on the ice. In such institutions people occasionally sleep overnight in the same retreat center or facility, so that everybody can see each other’s real self, before makeup and after dinner.
Such organizations often tell and retell a sacred origin story about themselves. Many experienced a moment when they nearly failed, and they celebrate the heroes who pulled them from the brink. They incorporate music into daily life, because it is hard not to become bonded with someone you have sung and danced with.
They have idiosyncratic local cultures. Too many colleges, for example, feel like one another. But the ones that really leave a mark on their students (St. John’s, Kenyon, Wheaton, MIT) have the courage to be distinct. You can love or hate such places. But when you meet a graduate you know it, and when they meet each other, even decades hence, they know they have something important in common.
University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth adds that thick institutions almost always have a clearly defined shared goal, such as winning the Super Bowl or saving the environment. They have initiation rituals; a sacred guidebook or object passed down from generation to generation; distinct jargon and phrases that are spoken inside the culture but misunderstood outside it; a label, such as being a KIPPster for a KIPP charter school student; and they often have uniforms or other emblems, such as flags, rings, bracelets.
Jonathan Haidt of NYU advises that if you want to create a thick institution, you should call attention to the traits people have in common, not the ones that set them apart. Second, exploit synchrony. Have people sing or play or move together. Third, create healthy competition among teams, not individuals. People fight and sacrifice more for their buddies than for an abstraction, so embed people in team relationships.
Thick institutions are oriented around a shared moral cause. They don’t see their members as resources to be exploited but as fellow marchers in a holy mission. Thick institutions tear you down in order to build you up. They enmesh you within long traditions and sacred customs that seem archaic a lot of the time. They ask you to bury your own identity in