I’ve been watching David Logan’s presentation on Tribal leadership on TED a lot over the last couple of weeks and something occurred to me today I want to share. For a long time I’ve been thinking that we need to make tech centric apartment buildings. The sort of buildings where you don’t need to call an electrician to install more power outlets or run wires all around the edges of the wall to get the network running. Where you don’t have to worry about security, backups, networks and you can share files. You can log in and see that the car-park is undergoing maintenance next week and when you meet another resident while checking your box you have something in common to discuss besides the weather or the headline news. I suppose if you’re reading this you’re online, probably better than average in terms of education and this sounds great but how does it relate to tribes and what about tribal leadership?
David Logan in his presentation on TED.com talks about there being five stages of a tribal culture. Starting with level one, life sucks moving up to level two, my life sucks, then where most of us are level three: I’m great (& you’re not), up to level four, We’re Great 
then finally to Life’s Great. The problem is that we can only understand one level above and below where we are at. This means that to empower leaders you need to learn to meet people where they’re at and direct them to the next level. And here’s the tie in to the apartments. With a building in a stage 5 culture, could there be a more useful method of taking stage 2′s and threes and leading by example? I think not.
