What does "clan" actually mean?

With the death of the Queen and all the royal hoopla surrounding the Windsors, all non-blue bloods and non-Brits have once again become aware of how important belonging is for us humans. Perhaps that's why a word that has been used mainly in the gaming community for the past few years has recently spilled over into marketing departments and agencies. Suddenly, teams are calling themselves clans.

The term was once stolen from the first-person shooter computer game Quake and introduced to the e-sports community. Clan stands for the association of gamers who register together to play together. More than half a million people in Switzerland - according to a study from 2021 by the Institute of Marketing Management at ZHAW - describe themselves as e-sport players:in and many of them are organized in such clans. The influence of the gaming industry in general and e-sports in particular on our working world is great. We've known this not just since we started using Slack, but since the term gamification has been bandied about.

Only tribes will survive

Nevertheless, it is surprising that now, when we have just learned to see ourselves as teams, we already have to reorient ourselves again. But this is not new either. "Only tribes will survive" was a famous graffiti of the Zurich youth movement in 1980, meaning that only together can you be strong and overthrow the establishment. That seems to have worked, because 40 years later, many from that time are themselves the establishment, and many a person feels threatened when employees quit their jobs because they no longer feel they belong. They sheer off because they long more for a clan that suits their needs. For a Buckingham Palace instead of an empty office.

The more complex the tasks and the more turbulent the times, the greater the need for structure and common ground. That's what clans can offer. More than teams. This is how it was in ancient Scotland, where, under the harshest living conditions, large family groups separated themselves from one another and referred to a common genetic origin in order to survive. It's the same today, when the echo chambers of social media celebrate academic, geographic, or sporting affiliation as a way of setting oneself apart.

In Scotland, the word has an old tradition. In e-sports, it's a rather young one. But the clans are cool everywhere at the moment. In England, too, where Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia" may be getting on in years, but in view of Brexit and the death of the Queen, the need for closeness and belonging has risen sharply again. So it is understandable that people prefer to talk about clans rather than teams. Especially since the latter is anything but what we really long for in everyday office life due to Microsoft's platform of the same name.

* Benno Maggi is co-founder and CEO of Partner & Partner. He has been eavesdropping on the industry for over 30 years, discovering words and terms for us that can either be used for small talk, pomposity, excitement, playing Scrabble, or just because.