"What do you want to achieve together?" It's a crucial question for any group. But asking it too soon – before addressing the invisible forces that shape group dynamics – often leads to surface-level agreement that crumbles under pressure. Building genuine shared purpose requires something deeper.
At ProSocial World, we've learned that focusing on collective aspirations while ignoring individual fears and resistance is like building a house on quicksand. The real breakthrough comes from creating spaces where people feel safe enough to voice what usually remains hidden: their doubts, competing priorities, and fears of vulnerability.
Let me share an example from something that just happened to me. Recently, I needed to dock my boat on a stormy day with my daughters aboard. On the surface, my stated goal was simple: dock safely. But beneath that lay competing concerns: protecting the boat from damage, maintaining my image as a capable father, and feeling embarrassed about needing help in the windy conditions.
By examining these deeper layers, I realized my key success criteria were a) the boat's safety and b) modelling authentic leadership for my daughters. This led me to both call the marina for assistance and openly share my decision-making process with my daughters afterward, including my initial reluctance to appear vulnerable.
This multilevel awareness - of both individual and collective dynamics - is what makes ProSocial's approach powerful. When groups truly excel, they operate through two interconnected evolutionary loops: they evolve their shared purpose together while simultaneously evolving the actions they take to fulfil that purpose. This process requires creating safe spaces where people can voice not just their aspirations but also their fears and concerns - the elements that often remain hidden yet powerfully influence group dynamics.
You can learn more about this process in the ProSocial book or our training. We live in an age where disinformation and manufactured doubt actively erode our capacity to cooperate. When we can't trust others' stated intentions or verify shared facts, the foundations of collective action crumble. What's needed is a virtuous cycle: as groups practice authentic sharing of their true purposes and concerns, they build the trust necessary for deeper cooperation. This increased trust then makes it safer for people to be even more authentic about their hopes and fears. Through this upward spiral of trust and authenticity, groups can resist the forces pulling us toward cynicism and tribal division.
A Rich Intellectual Heritage
ProSocial's approach to shared purpose draws from a powerful lineage of ideas. Darwin's theory of evolution first revealed how variation, selection, and retention shape life itself. This evolutionary thinking influenced the pragmatists, particularly William James and John Dewey, who applied these principles to understanding human knowledge and social progress. More recently, Contextual Behavioral Science has built upon these foundations to develop practical methods for human psychological development and group cooperation.
This intellectual progression - from evolutionary theory to pragmatism to Contextual Behavioral Science - provides ProSocial with robust theoretical foundations for understanding how groups can evolve their shared purpose.
The Pragmatic Foundation
In a world of deepening division, we often get trapped in absolute judgments about others—they are "evil," "lazy," or "out to get us." Pragmatism offers a liberating alternative: Instead of treating these judgments as fixed truths; it asks us to focus on what truly matters to us and to listen deeply to what matters to others. This shift from absolute truth to shared understanding and valuing opens new possibilities for connection and collaboration.
As Gillespie et al. (2024, p. 14) note, "The future is an expectation awaiting disruption." Our judgments and assumptions about others are not fixed truths but hypotheses to be tested through experience and dialogue. For pragmatists, truth emerges through examining real-world outcomes and asking: Did this help us move toward what we truly care about? Did it help others move toward what they care about?
This is why ProSocial's multilevel approach to purpose is so helpful. By enabling individuals to surface both their aspirations and concerns, while simultaneously weaving these into collective purpose, we create a pragmatic framework for testing and evolving our beliefs and actions together.
This philosophical foundation gains practical strength through what Ansell (2011) calls "public scrutiny and testing." Truth claims must undergo a rigorous process of social validation where "multiple perspectives and forms of knowledge" are brought into dialogue. This isn't just about individual verification - it requires collective deliberation and experiential testing. Ansell’s work makes it clear how this approach could underpin an entirely new form of democracy when applied at scale.
From Individual to Collective Purpose
ProSocial's multilevel approach transforms how we understand both individual and collective goals. When we share our aspirations, fears, and concerns openly, we enter what Ansell describes as a "public learning process." Here, our individual purposes aren't simply aggregated but evolved together through dialogue and shared experience. This process helps surface and address the often undiscussable elements that can derail group success.
When we talk about "truth is what works in context" some worry this leads to relativism - a view that any belief or action is equally valid. But pragmatism actually creates stronger accountability, not less. When groups explicitly declare their shared purposes and goals together, they're making clear commitments about what "good" means in their context. These commitments then become collective selection criteria - helping determine which behaviors and practices actually serve the group's declared purpose.
This mirrors how cultural evolution works more broadly: practices that genuinely serve human needs and values tend to persist and spread, while those that don't fade away. The key is making our selection criteria - our shared purposes and values - explicit rather than implicit.
A Science of Connection
While we speak of this as a "scientific" framework, it's crucial to understand that this is a science of the heart - one that begins and ends with what people love, fear, and care about most deeply. Unlike traditional scientific approaches that attempt to separate emotion from observation, this framework recognizes that our deepest feelings are not obstacles to be overcome but rather essential guides to what matters most.
Think of how Indigenous cultures have long practised deep listening - not just to words, but to the land, to relationships, to the subtle signals that emerge when people come together with shared intention. This wisdom reminds us that building a shared purpose isn't about forcing outcomes through rigid planning. Instead, it's about creating spaces where people feel safe enough to share their hopes and fears, and then moving forward with sensitivity to how our choices ripple through relationships and environments.
Like my experience docking the boat, our deepest truths often emerge in moments of vulnerability. The science lies not in controlling these moments, but in creating conditions where people feel safe enough to share what really matters - their loves, their fears, their hopes for connection and meaning. This is inherently risky; sharing what we truly care about makes us vulnerable. When I tell you that what I really want is to be loved, accepted, and capable of making a difference, I'm giving you information that could be used to hurt me.
This is precisely why trust is so essential, and why ProSocial pays such careful attention to building it. When we create conditions where people feel safe enough to share their deepest truths, something remarkable happens: the very vulnerability that makes us hesitate becomes the foundation for deeper connection and collaboration. This isn't just about individual courage - it's about weaving a web of mutual understanding and care that makes courage possible.
This practice of clarifying and connecting individual and collective purpose isn't just theoretical - we've seen it transform hundreds of groups across sectors, from small nonprofits to major corporations to community organizations.
The ProSocial Journey
This exploration of shared purpose is part of a larger framework for building effective groups. It builds upon the following modules in our ProSocial trainings:
And leads into:
- Agreements for working together (the CDPs)
- Converging on shared action (inclusive decision making)
Through this process, we create the conditions for groups to evolve both their purpose and their practices, guided by pragmatic principles of social accountability and collective learning. We have our introductory Becoming ProSocial course starting on the 22nd of January 2025. If you would like to join us, check out our programs here.
References
Ansell, C. (2011). Pragmatist Democracy: Evolutionary Learning as Public Philosophy. Oup Usa.
Gillespie, A., Glăveanu, V., & De Saint Laurent, C. (2024). Pragmatism and Methodology: Doing Research That Matters with Mixed Methods (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009031066
