The Tribal Habit Slowing Business Growth Across the Valleys

I grew up in Mountain Ash.

If you're from there, you already know what that means. If you're not… let me explain something important.

Before I knew what a balance sheet was. Before I knew what a P&L was. Before I'd even considered what it meant to run a business – I knew one thing with absolute certainty.

I was from Mountain Ash… and that mattered.

Not Aberdare. Not Pontypridd. Not Merthyr.

Mountain Ash.

And I'd argue that sentence has had more influence on the commercial landscape of South Wales than any business support programme. We've just never had the honesty or the intellectual curiosity to talk about it.

Let me start with the psychology.

In the 1970s, social psychologist Henri Tajfel conducted a series of landmark studies, now known as the Minimal Group Paradigm experiments. His findings were, frankly, unsettling in their simplicity.

When participants were randomly divided into groups – they systematically awarded more points and more resources to members of their own group than to outsiders. The mere act of being categorised into a group was sufficient to trigger loyalty, favouritism, and quiet bias against everyone else.

Social Identity Theory, built on Tajfel's work, tells us that the groups we belong to provide the foundation of who we are. We don't just join groups. We become them. And we protect them.

Now apply that to growing up in Rhondda Cynon Taf.

Here's what actually happens to a child from the Cynon Valley.

From the moment you start school, you are inducted – not consciously, not deliberately, but powerfully… into a tribal identity. Your school is your tribe. Your street is your tribe. Your end of town is your tribe.

You wear it. You defend it. You represent it on the football pitch, on the rugby field, in the park.

As you get older, the circle expands, but the instinct doesn't change. Now it's your valley. Your team. Your community. And the next valley over? They're not the enemy exactly – but they're not yours either.

This isn't unique to Wales. But it is intensified here in a way that is culturally specific, geographically reinforced, and generationally transferred. The valleys aren't just places. They are identities. Tight, proud, fiercely loyal identities – shaped by shared history, shared struggle, and shared geography.

And that is, genuinely, one of the most beautiful things about where we're from.

Until it isn't.

Because here's what nobody says out loud.

That same instinct, that deeply human, neurologically wired, psychologically reinforced sense of tribal belonging, doesn't disappear when you start a business. It goes underground.

While we don't need our tribe to survive in the way our ancestors did, the instinct is still there. We still gravitate towards people who feel familiar, who sound like us, who come from places like ours. And without even noticing it, that shapes who we trust, who we listen to, and who we keep at arm's length.

So the founder from Mountain Ash who's “difficult to work with?” Who's seen as insular, or overly competitive, or resistant to collaboration…

I'd ask you to slow down before you reach that conclusion.

Because in my experience – and I've worked with enough founders across RCT to say this with confidence… it's rarely arrogance. It's rarely ego. It's rarely a genuine unwillingness to grow.

It's tribal code, running silently in the background. An unconscious filter that says: I trust what I know. I trust who I know. I trust where I'm from.

It's the kid from Mountain Ash who learned, bone-deep, that you look after your own and that asking for help from outside your circle is a quiet kind of weakness.

It's not a character flaw. It's a psychological pattern, formed in childhood, never examined, never named, never challenged.

These biases are not innately malicious. They are shortcuts our brains use to make sense of a complex world.

And here is where I get concerned. Genuinely concerned.

Because right now, conversations are happening at policy level, at government level, about how business support in Wales will be structured in the coming twelve months and potentially beyond. National frameworks. Centralised agencies. Consolidated delivery models.

And I want to ask one question that I don't think anyone is asking loudly enough:

Who designed these around the psychology of the people they're supposed to serve?

Because if you build a business support structure that requires a founder from Ferndale or Ynysybwl or Mountain Ash to engage with a centralised body – one that feels distant, unfamiliar, not theirs… you have already, before a single meeting has taken place, triggered every unconscious barrier that their upbringing installed in them.

They won't call it tribal instinct. They'll call it “not for me.” They'll call it “too far.” They'll call it “doesn't understand businesses like ours.”

And they'll be right, even if they can't articulate exactly why.

The interesting thing that research shows is that when people from different groups start working towards the same goal, those barriers begin to come down. The differences don't seem quite so important anymore. And often, just getting people in the same room and in-person is enough to start changing perceptions.

The important word there is in person. Locally. On familiar ground. Within the tribe.

I'm not writing this to be difficult.

I'm writing this because I grew up in this culture. I carry this code too. And part of the work I do through Blackline Academy is helping founders see the unconscious patterns that are quietly capping their growth – including this one.

But I can only do that work if those founders are willing to come to the table. And they will only come to the table if the table feels like it belongs to them.

A national structure… however well-intentioned, however competently designed, does not feel like it belongs to a founder from Mountain Ash. Not instinctively. Not immediately. And for many, not ever.

That's not a failure of ambition. That's psychology. That's identity. That's decades of learned behaviour doing exactly what it was built to do.

So here's what I'd ask of anyone with a hand in shaping business support policy in Wales.

Before you finalise the framework… before you centralise the delivery, before you streamline the touch points, before you congratulate yourselves on efficiency… spend some time in the valleys. Not Cardiff Bay. Not a consultation event at a hotel meeting room off the A470.

Go to Mountain Ash. Go to Treherbert. Go to Aberdare. Sit with the founders there. Listen to how they talk about trust. About who they'd ask for help. About why they haven't engaged with support before.

And then ask yourself whether your proposal accounts for any of that.

Because the tribal code isn't going away. It's been there since these communities were formed. It kept people alive through pit disasters and deindustrialisation and every wave of economic hardship that followed.

The least we can do is understand it before we design around it.