By Dr Leandro Herrero
The managerial temptation is to take a permanent feature of social organisation, give it the status of a newly discovered crisis, then classify it as dysfunction.
Every few years, management discovers the moon.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer describes a “crisis of insularity”, reporting that seven in ten people are unwilling or hesitant to trust someone different from themselves. The finding matters. But the phenomenon is not new. Human beings did not begin clustering into familiar groups after the arrival of social media, misinformation or geopolitical anxiety. We have been doing it for as long as we have been human.
Apparently, people prefer people like themselves. They trust familiar sources more readily than unfamiliar ones. They gather around those who share their values, language, background or view of the world. Groups become tribes; tribes become echo chambers; echo chambers inhibit collaboration; and innovation suffers. That’s a pristine logic that starts with the obvious and normal and ends on a training programme to ‘fix it’.
Once something has been labelled dysfunctional, an intervention cannot be far behind.
But similarity attracting similarity is not, in itself, a malfunction. It is one of the ways social systems form.
Network science has a useful name for part of this process: preferential attachment. When a network grows, new nodes do not attach themselves evenly or at random. They are more likely to connect to nodes that already possess many connections. The connected become more connected. Visibility attracts visibility. Reputation attracts reputation. Membership attracts membership.
This is sometimes called the Matthew Effect: “to those who have, more will be given”. In network theory, it helps to explain why a small number of hubs acquire a disproportionate share of connections while many other nodes remain relatively peripheral. I did refer to this property of networks in Viral Change™ in 2006 and then it became one of the pillars of my work on peer-to-peer power.
The principle is easy to observe. A heavily cited academic paper attracts more citations partly because it is already visible. Inside organisations, certain individuals become informal reference points. Colleagues seek them out because others seek them out. Their influence compounds.
This does not require conspiracy, manipulation or even deliberate choice. Initial differences, sometimes little more than accident, can become magnified over time.
Preferential attachment is not the whole explanation for human affiliation. Homophily – the tendency to associate with similar others – also matters. So do history, status, professional identity and shared experience. But together these forces tell us something management repeatedly resists: networks are not naturally even, neutral or democratically distributed.
Nor should they be.
Management could do with understanding the basics of social science: clusters create belonging, trust, memory and speed. Strong professional communities accumulate knowledge. Teams develop shorthand. Informal groups solve problems without waiting for formal permission. Scientific advances, artistic movements and commercial innovations frequently emerge from dense communities whose members share a language and recognise one another’s competence.
To call clustering dysfunctional is therefore rather rich. What looks like insularity from the outside may feel like cohesion from within. The same bonds that exclude some people also allow others to cooperate with extraordinary efficiency.
The real question is not whether clusters exist. It is whether anything travels between them.
Innovation rarely depends on abolishing tribes. It depends on creating permeability between them. New ideas often arise when knowledge, practices or perspectives move from one established community into another.
The important people are therefore not only the most connected hubs inside a group, but also those who connect groups that would otherwise remain apart.
These boundary-crossers are often invisible to the formal organisation chart. They may have no impressive title and no formal mandate. Yet they translate languages, carry stories, broker trust and introduce people who would not normally meet. They are bridges in a system that management still insists on viewing as boxes and reporting lines. All these, formal-visible and informal-invisible, can be mapped via Social Network Analysis (SNA).
The practical implication for leaders is not to instruct people to become less tribal. Nor is it to launch another campaign celebrating openness, collaboration and diverse thinking. Declared aspiration rarely rewires a network. The task is to engineer, not control, the conditions in which unexpected connections become more likely.
That means finding the informal hubs, not merely the senior people. It means identifying who is trusted, imitated and able to carry ideas across boundaries. It means creating small, purposeful exchanges around real work rather than ceremonial encounters devoted to “collaboration”. It means giving useful ideas several routes through the organisation instead of expecting them to descend through the management cascade.
Leaders should pay particular attention to the bridges. A network containing strong clusters and multiple bridges can combine cohesion with novelty.
A network made only of clusters becomes fragmented. A network made only of weak, indiscriminate connections may produce contact without trust.
The goal is not universal agreement. It is not even universal connection. Both are fantasies.
People will continue to gather around familiarity. Tribes will form, professional identities will harden and trusted circles will defend their boundaries. None of this is new, and not all of it needs fixing.
Leadership begins by distinguishing a human constant from an organisational pathology. This habit needs to stop.
Hierarchies exist, therefore hierarchy is the problem. People imitate, therefore individuality is under threat. Informal groups emerge, therefore formal organisations are obsolete. People cluster, therefore organisations have become dysfunctional
The crisis is not that people prefer people like themselves. The crisis begins when management mistakes that fact for a recent discovery, blames it for every failure of collaboration and reaches for another programme designed to correct human nature.
Networks naturally create hubs. Tribes naturally create belonging. Similarity naturally attracts similarity. Leadership begins where nature leaves off: not by replacing spontaneous order with designed order, but by creating the conditions under which spontaneous order produces unexpected connections.
Innovation does not require the end of tribes.
It requires bridges.
Dr Leandro Herrero
