The Dunbar Playbook
A CRM system for your friends
Thanks to Dakota Quackenbush from Authentic Bay Area for an earlier version of this tool.
So far, the main motivation for my work as a community builder and authentic relating facilitator was meeting my own need for connection.
I think that was a mistake.
First, it is difficult to harvest the fruits of community while I’m the one responsible for creating and holding the space. Second, this motivation leads to botched incentives that end up serving neither the cause nor me. After all, the subset of broke EAs and hippies I enjoy spending my time with the most are not in too dire need of my services, nor particularly capable of helping me pay my rent.
In other words, I’ve finally given up on trying to poop where I eat. Instead of building a product for my in-group, I now try to anchor my life in my tribe, and use the energy I get there to build products that serve the outside world and pay my rent.
Wish me luck.
Because my life happens all over the globe and making new friends is more intuitive for me than sustaining long-term relationships, I want to be a bit strategic about building a tribe that keeps me energized.
That’s where the Dunbar Playbook comes into play.
Some theory: Dunbar’s Number
The Dunbar Playbook is named after Dunbar’s Number, the number of people one can maintain personal relationships with.
In his earlier research, anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar concluded that that’s about 150 people. Later, he found that there are actually different circles of friendship. Apparently, people have a handful of very close friends, a couple more best friends, and vastly more loose friends and acquaintances. (Who would have thought.)
The Atlantic cites the following layers, with each layer being ~3x the size of the preceding ones:
1.5 people: Intimates
5: Close friends
15: Best friends
50: Good friends
150: Friends
500: Acquaintances
1500: Known names
5000: Known faces
Of course, these are all just rough approximations. Introverts will invest more energy into fewer people, extraverts less into more. There are probably also cultural differences or something.
Introducing the Dunbar Playbook
However big or small these circles are for you: It will probably not hurt to be a explicit about who is part of which one. Fine-grained categories make it easier to track where your priorities lie.
The process for creating a Dunbar Playbook is simple: Make a list of people you are or want to be friends with. Note down the “is” and “ought” of your relationship, and whichever other information you want to save in the playbook. Here is my playbook in anonymized form:
On the left, you find a bunch of tiers - inspired by the circles of friendship in the article above. How I named the categories is irrelevant. What’s important is that I want to be very intentional about investing into my relationships with the uppermost Alices and Bobs, and for the ones lower on the list, occasional “how are you?”s and a call every couple months is enough.
Then, you find the names of my people. The “Is”-column indicates where I’m at with these people (sorted by lowest to highest), and the “Want”-column indicates how close I’d like these relationships to be. The “want”-column is the one I actually auto-sort this list by; the “is”-column just shows discrepancies and how far from my desired state I currently am.
The boundaries between the categories are not firm, just very rough sizes of the different circles I think might be good to aim for. Sometimes the boundaries and the number of people I actually want in that tier match.For example, as there’s currently nobody who could count as an “Intimate” for me, tier 2/”close friends” spills over into tier 1.
Creating your own playbook
If this seems useful, you can use my template and go through the following steps to create your own playbook.
1. Start with a list of names: Brainstorm all the people currently in your life. Some questions that might be helpful:
Who do you consider Friends? Family? Co-workers? Acquaintances?
Who do you regularly spend time with?
Who do you *want* to spend time with, but don’t yet?
…
Write until your list has at least 75 people. Don’t obsess about perfection and completeness; this is a living document you can add to or remove from at any time. Just have *some* list to start with.
2. Add or remove columns. Add whatever additional information your playbook shall contain; remove what doesn’t suit you. Dakota’s original playbook, for example, didn’t have the “is” and “ought”-columns that are crucial to mine. Maybe she never overthinks who to invite over for dinner, gets overwhelmed by the options, and then stays home alone.
You might want a column for things you have to contribute to your peoples’ lives? Ways in which they could be beneficial for you? Their location in the world? Their relationship status, so that you can play matchmaker?
Include whatever feels useful, delete what doesn’t. Experiment and iterate. For example, a friend of mine tracks whether people reliably show up when they say “yes” to an event. (I don’t look good on that list.) Another friend has the policy to never accept anyone to a retreat again when they don’t show without canceling. Blocking spots for people on the waitlist sucks.
3. Fill the Is-column. Now that you have a list of (potential) friends and acquaintances, assign numbers to each of them that indicate how close you currently are. No need to overthink it; just fill it by gut, you can make infinite corrections later on.
4. Fill the Want-column. Order the people by how much you are willing to invest into the relationships with them. That should be a lot for the inner circle, and less and less for the outermost. Who are you eager to spend more time with? Who is actually more present in your life than you’d appreciate? IMPORTANT: Be completely honest with yourself at this step. There’s no forbidden feelings, no reason to suppress your first reaction. After all, nobody but you will see this list of numbers. And if you have strong reasons to contradict your gut, you can still do that later on.
5. Sort the columns. By the numbers you put into “Is” and “Want”, or by location, or whatever. In Google docs, you can do that by marking the whole table, clicking “tools > data > create a filter”. Then, click the green triangle thingy in one of the top cells and sort by whatever criterion you like. Personally, I first sort “is” by “z-a” and then “want” by “a-z”, so that the most underinvested people in each tier are at the top.
6. Invest. When a number in the ought-column is higher than in the is-column, that tells you to make more intentional investments into that relationship. Set up a regular call? Drop an occasional “how are you?” Schedule a game of laser tag? Throw a party only for the 5-10 highest people on your list? That depends on you. There is probably wonderful advice out there for how to make friends. It’s up to you to google for it and throw out the junk.
If you want to build more close connections, I’d suggest you keep the overall list as short as possible (below 75?) and work your way down from the uppermost categories (“intimates”+”close friends”). If you want a bigger network, aim for a longer list and invest broadly but intentionally.
7. Continually adjust course. No matter what you choose - remember: Don’t be fixated on any particular outcome. After all, it takes two to tango, and nobody owes you anything. You know that you’re on track when your investments feel like random acts of kindness you don’t expect anything back for. You know that you are off-track when you start accumulating resentment for unreciprocated efforts. So: Celebrate when something comes back, and move on when it doesn’t. In order to be sure that your playbook aligns with reality, you may want to revise it weekly, monthly, or at whatever interval suits you.
That’s it. Let me know whether you have fun with the Dunbar Playbook!