I like the analogy with ants; we can observe ants, understand that their own individual needs / programming create emergent group behaviors and say "oh, that's

I like the analogy with ants; we can observe ants, understand that their own individual needs / programming create emergent group behaviors and say "oh, that's why that colony behaves as it does" (making the colony of millions of ants into an individual somehow). But when it comes to humans, we waste too much intellectual effort on the individuals and not on the group, i.e. on why and how the social group / team emerges and behaves as it does. For example, it's pretty clear to me that whether you are talking about a startup team, or a cult, or a religious group, or a political party (the smaller the party, the truer this is) one of the core aspects of social organization is recruiting: i.e. why can you attract people to your group. That messaging is important and has to work and it has to address some core human/individual need, but after you make it work, adding people to your group becomes easier. Now, conversely, if that startup is not doing very well, or that political party doesn't look like it will get power, the messaging / recruiting mechanism becomes much more important: it's how the group is tied together and how it survives (by attracting more people / replacing attrition). At that point, for the people in the group that need the group to continue, recruiting becomes a primary goal; more so than even the actual operative / paper goal of the group (profit, political power, whatever). That's where niche marketing / issue of the day becomes more important than ever: join our startup/party to provide alternative food sources to the world; to shift the world's consciousness; to provide justice to those wronged; whatever. To me that's a core failure point, where the startup/party/group should just fold up tents and do something else. They are wasting energy just to keep being a group rather than achieve an end result (their original goal). But we, as social animals (ants as per the OP) can't/won't see that far. We just keep on grinding.