Group Types:

Attempts to persuade an individual of a different (opposing?) group requires an understand of which 'type' of group your target and you yourself belong to.

There are three types of groups: Tribes, Teams, and Practitioners (those whose organizational bond revolves around the use of a shared, specific tool). But, when alliterative triplets knock on your door, you don't turn them away. Therefore, Tribes, Teams and Tools.

You can identify group types by looking at their purpose, and the way group members enter and exit the group.

Purposes:

Tribes: Survive. Protect the organization/group at all costs.

Teams: Win. Accomplish the predetermined goal.

Tools: Complete tasks.

These (sort of) map to strategic, operational, tactical levels of war, and tribes and teams also correlate with infinite and finite games, but that's more interesting than useful at this point.

Identifying Group Type By Entry and Exit:

One way to determine the type of group is to ask who someone enters or exits the group.

Tribes Entry: You must be 'born' (raised within the walls, rules and expectations of the tribe) or 'baptized' (ritualistically checked for 'purity', aka acknowledgement of the sacred nature of the rules/doctrine, demonstration of commitment to the adherence to the rules, and denunciation of prior help beliefs in the antagonistic or unfamiliar doctrines/rules of other groups.)

Tribes Exit: Exit comes through 'escape' (overcoming the pull of the people within the group and the efforts of the 'pastors' of the group to make sure no one leaves) or 'expulsion' (the group finds the person unfit for the group and forcibly removes them.)

Team Entry: You are either 'hired' (the team sees you as an potential positive addition to the team and obtaining their goal and entices you to join) or 'acquired' (a current group you belong to is absorbed by another group under the same understanding as the acquisition process for a single person - the group is seen as a potential positive addition)

Team Exit: You are fired (team initiated removal), retired (person initiated removal) or traded (initiated by one or both teams - receiving and departing - for transactional purposes)

Tool Entry: You are trained to use the tool in order to complete tasks.

Tool Exit: You simply abandon the tool.

Tribe Examples: Democrats, Mormons, Americans, "Mean Girls" cliques.

Team Examples: Businesses, Non-profits, sports teams.

Tool Examples: Javascript Developers, Vegans, Cross-fitters.

Group Type Evolution:

These groups can morph into other group types if the dynamics and goals change, so immediate classification can be tricky.

"Crossfit is a way of life" people (tool-to-tribe), "Microsoft vs Apple" (team-to-tribe or tool-to-tribe depending on whether the person is an employee or consumer), ReactJS opensource community (tool-to-team), "I'm just a Democrat because my friends are" (tribe-to-tool...kind of. Talk about this some other time).

Coming soon: nuances in how to approach persuading someone from each of these groups.