The common pairing of needs of Acceptance and Bond extends from the individual to group and back again. A sense of belonging to and connection with a group inspires observations such as "This is my tribe, my 'real' family. These are my people." The individual is nurtured within the group, gains insight and risks within the safety the group provides. In this way, groups are powerful and enlivening teachers; their lessons can last a lifetime.

Take the case for Eric, an American now forty-three years old and living in Mumbai, India, and still influenced by a peak group experience in his early teens. Thirty years ago he joined a team of junior high boys at the local YMCA. This team played different sports, sold candy, participated in talent shows, and used the Y as a place to hang out. Looking back on this time, he says, "It became a very important group in terms of my identity, positive use of time, attitudes toward the world . . . and toward girls. We were a very diverse group of all different colors: Japanese, Korean, Polish, East Indian, Irish. I didn't know most of them when I joined." Humor was important to the boys. Not all that great at sports, Eric remembers learning about wit from this group: "We couldn't slam dunk a basketball, but we sure could slam dunk a joke."

When we asked him how he saw himself changed because of the group, he said, "It's a matter of skills and confidence in interacting with people. We could talk about almost anything. After three years together, I knew I could be appreciated and liked outside my family. Consistently." Later he added, "I don't know if we knew we were growing, but this felt good and I was where I belonged." Looking back thirty years, Eric knows he learned some lasting lessons. And, in spite of living half-way around the world, he is still actively in touch with some of the boys-now-men who were a part of his Y team. And who knows how much that early diverse group influenced his life and career in international journalism?

Which of the six needs do you see in play in Eric's life? Turn back to our earlier questions on pages 124 and 125 to gain more from Eric's story.

Bond and Reality can come together to connect a group facing hard challenges in the external world, bonding the group even more tightly.

Marguerite, grappling with a challenging situation related to the health of her daughter, joined an online group and connected with other parents facing the same circumstances. For two and half years, her daily participation in this group has, as she says, "made my life livable! It boils down to that. If no one gets it—your spouse, your family, your friends—you are at a loss." Marguerite's Reality is that her beautiful, seven-year-old daughter has five mental health diagnoses, including being bipolar. Marguerite says, "When I went online, all these other parents across the country told the same story. I was crying and crying to know I was not alone. It was an incredible relief!"

Online five or six times a day, Marguerite uses the group for medical advice, information on medications, emotional support, suggestions for how to deal with the school system, and advocacy. She sees it as "one-stop shopping. Someone will know the answer to the question; someone will have been through it." Even though she has never met any of the group members in person, her Bond with them is palpable. "I quit for one year," she told us. "But I found I was too isolated and needed more support that no one outside the group could offer. So I got back online and got so much support!" Messages quickly came in saying, "Welcome back! How is your daughter?" Through the online community, Marguerite's daughter has even found an e-mail buddy in another state, a child her age with similar challenges. With huge social issues to face at school, the two communicate online and talk on the phone, an opportunity that helps both children feel appreciated and less alone.

Through her Bond with this group, Marguerite became more effective in handling her Reality. And, what other Group Needs do you see at play? Review the six; you may be surprised. Imagine how they contributed to Marguerite's more transformative moments. Also consider the questions we posed early in the chapter.

Whether Art imitates Life, or it's the other way around, we think that the old television program Cheers had much to say about extraordinary groups. That cast of flawed and lovable characters would assemble in the tavern four to five nights a week. The group seldom talked about it, but we viewers could see that the Bond they shared allowed them to go out and deal with the realities of their own worlds. And occasionally, some flash of self-Acceptance would arrive for various characters. Transformative? In a quiet way, building a pattern of personal support from a group implicitly clear on what held it together. We think that Rob's story illustrates a similar combination of Group Needs—but in a vastly different setting.

In the summer of 2007, Rob joined a group of fifteen others for a three week raft trip in a remote part of Alaska. No one on the trip knew everyone; several were former Outward Bound guides; eight of the ten adults had attended college together. Five children of some group members, ages eleven to twenty, came along. This group paddled two hundred miles of river through multiple mountain ranges and indescribably beautiful wilderness. They arrived by land, flew out by plane and didn't see other humans for eleven days.

For Rob, aged fifty-seven, the trip was unforgettable: "We were a tribe—we moved across the land and down the river together." In the first week, one boat flipped, tossing four people into the rapids—including a mother, father, and daughter; a family that had tragically lost their other daughter some years before. Rob remembers, "This was very scary. Yet we were very successful in how we handled the crisis—we only lost one paddle! This brought us together more and helped us respect the challenges and dangers on the river." The remote setting was an undeniable Reality. "We absolutely depended on one another to survive. If we didn't work well together, we wouldn't make it. This was not contrived." Knowing himself and what he could contribute, Rob brought his rafting skills and his wilderness savvy. He is a natural when it comes to building relationships. And he trained to make sure he was physically strong enough for the trip.

The trip reconfirmed Rob's belief in the transformative effect of time in the wilderness—something that had slipped in his busy life. He sees the cross-family and cross-generational relationships that were built on the trip and he expects them to last. Rob says, "I don't really know how to articulate this. I have no current religious life and only a small spiritual practice. But this experience involved God. Our spirits were touched. The earth revealed all of its beauty to us. The universe allowed us to have this extraordinary experience together. We were blessed."

What particularly strikes you about Group Needs met in Rob's story? And which answers to the list of questions at the beginning of this chapter are particularly intriguing? How can you imagine that the feelings of being changed, energized, connected, or hopeful materialized for the rafters?

The next story links the Self and Group loops in the transforming combination of Potential and Purpose. This linkage further clarifies for an individual just what his Potential might be, and at the same time feeds the group Purpose. Let's learn more about this through Chris.

Since age twenty, Chris has traveled to Mexico once a year on church missionary work. Now twenty-eight, for the last seven years as an employed youth pastor, he has led groups of junior high school students on one-week missions to Puerto Peñasco, Mexico. "On my first trip, I went thinking that I had something great to offer. Now I see it completely from the opposite point of view—I am deeply humbled by all I have learned from my friends in Peñasco." Chris's sense of who he is has been transformed by how he sees the Purpose of the trips, and vice versa. Yes, the Purpose has to do with faith-based service to those less fortunate, but at a larger and more significant level it is about "helping young people understand the global ramifications of uniting with other cultures, so that they understand their humanness in a world context." Reflecting on his own emerging Potential, Chris is very clear: "This has forever changed me. I will never think the same way again, never watch a news report in the same way. I am drastically changed by the warmth of the Mexican people. I am working on my Spanish. I am learning where their joy and faith come from. I am learning to be a global thinker. I want to know more about the world than what CNN tells me."

Chris's perception of the world changed and that changed him. What else do you note about this story related to his Group Needs, the four feelings, and transformation? Can you find similar experiences in your own life? Apply the questions at the beginning of this chapter to Chris's situation.

The link between Purpose and Impact is common in workplace organizations as people form groups to change some aspect of their internal or external world. Magda's story began there but, to her delight, added the additional element of Bond among group members.

In the international division of a food products company, Magda—who is Polish—led a virtual team of herself and three external consultants, each from a different country: Germany, Ireland, and the United States. Their initial Purpose was to design and implement a diversity and inclusion program that would increase business results in 180 countries outside the United States, affecting 90,000 people. After four years, Magda knows the Impact of their work was much more than she originally anticipated. Surpassing her expectations for results, their team helped this global company become a more open and welcoming place to work. A place where "employees were given the courage to demand that the organization change and where individual leaders can truly impact the culture" of their facilities. For the company's U.S. division, such Impact was far more familiar and less revolutionary. But within the 180 countries on which Magda's team focused, the Impact on their world was both unusual and profound.

In addition, Magda knows that "these people became my friends." Mostly connected through technology, due to their geographical distance, she comments that the four of them "always felt a 'part of the family'—this was not just a relationship between a client and three contractors. I have never experienced this before—and I work with a lot of consultants." This quartet of four members, who have done amazing work and built a solid friendship with one another, has been the source of great learning for Magda. "I was brought up to think that people are equal." Through the course of this work, Magda realized that she was looking at the situations of others through her own fortunate life experiences. "What I didn't understand was that people need to have equal opportunity." She has applied this insight to the diversity and inclusion work and to her personal life. "In many conversations with my family or my friends, I now react quite strongly when issues of discrimination come up. I try to explore this with them in a positive way. I am conscious of modeling this for my daughter. Some time ago, I wouldn't have done this."

Notice the energy generated by a tight fit between Purpose and Impact. How does the addition of Bond augment the power of the experience? Where do you see transformation? Review those now-familiar questions on pages 124 and 125 as a way to think more about Magda's story.

Here is a story about powerful and concrete results—for the citizens of one region and for one of the key players in a group. Nine years ago, when this story took place, it was as though a stone was tossed into quiet lake water. The ripples of Impact continue to this day.

In the late 1990s, the building officials of four nearby cities had lunch and decided that it was time to get serious about two things: using technology to help meet citizen needs and partnering to do so. At the same time, a group of city managers put together a regional strategic plan for online services. John was tapped to coordinate the first project within this effort through a cross-boundary management team. The effort resulted in mybuildingpermit.com—an "e-government" system to allow citizens from four adjacent cities to secure their building permits online. Nationwide, this was considered cutting-edge work at the time. It was accomplished within only sixteen months from initiation to issuing the first online permit—a notable achievement given the complexity faced by the team. John shared with us that since its inception, mybuildingpermit.com has issues over 77,000 permits. The Impact of this effort? "Our very conservative estimate is that contractors have saved over $3 million in direct operating and labor costs." Imagine working collaboratively across four separate public sector organizations—each with its own city council, city manager, building division, permitting process, IT function, and computer equipment. By fulfilling their Purpose, John and his team set the stage for even wider community Impact, as they quickly moved on to developing other ways to connect citizens to local government through the use of computers.

Looking back it's easy to see a larger Purpose than simply creating an electronic permit process. The vision of the city managers and the building officials opened up a whole new way for citizens to engage with and be served by their local governments. This was a powerful notion whose time had come. In 2004, John stepped into the next phase of his Potential. He found himself executive director of a newly formed organization, sponsored by nine cities, and tasked with providing efficient and cost effective Web-based services to its constituents. John's agency has gone on to successfully launch a total of seven regional Web service portals ranging from parks and recreation to human services to online mapping to government procurement and online job applications. In 2009, this alliance was serving forty-three public agencies. As its leader, John continues to build on the lessons learned through the first project, and is even more committed to collaboration, engagement of stakeholders, and "leading without authority from the back of the bus." As he thinks about previous roles in his career, where he had more defined authority, John now sees that "I enjoy living in the gray—where things are ambiguous. I love being involved with new things and leveraging teamwork to do things that have never been done before. In this work, it's all about timing, bringing in the right talent at the right time, and relationships, relationships, relationships!"

We think John's story is a great way to wrap up Part Two. It's filled with accomplishment at the levels of Self, Group, and World; we know it was transformative for John and has had a powerful Impact on the way four cities and other jurisdictions go about serving citizens. What would you add to that? Look back one more time to our opening questions; they can help you reveal even more meaning in John's story.

As you have read stories from our extraordinary groups, we suspect that you have thought of a few of your own that could have been part of this chapter. Your stories could be considered through the same questions about Group Needs and transformation that we regularly asked. In doing so, you would require yourself to look through the loops of the Group Needs model; you might understand what happened in your story differently as you focused on these Group Needs. That in turn might suggest an action that would have been useful or an action you might take in the future. When you act to meet these Group Needs, the dynamics within the group change, and its Impact on the world changes as well.

Each of the stories we present—in this and other chapters—took place in ordinary groups of people who were not intentional about meeting anyone's Group Needs. Imagine what might occur in your groups if members consciously thought about helping others meet their needs for Acceptance, Potential, Bond, Purpose, Reality, and Impact? What if every time a group meets, the meeting design reflected two or more of these needs? Consider the difference it might make in the quality of conversation, if members were mindful of the six Group Needs. We predict that as you and other members satisfy Group Needs that cross the lines of Self, Group, and World, the "magic" of transformation will appear. And that as a result, you and others will be able to declare that you are changed, energized, connected, and hopeful.

Part Three takes you deeper into this territory.