41–50 of 58 posts
The irony is, Philip Rosedale often talked about the Dunbar number in relationship to how virtual communities were best formed/organized!
https://enwp.org/Dunbar's_Number
There is some criticism of Dunbar which I can't evaluate. Even if the specifics are inaccurate within it, there seems to be some truth to how sets of humans scale. I like the Alex Komoroske presentation below about "coordination headwind" as an explanation that doesn't need evolutionary psychology to work. It is easy to understand and deep enough to be well worth paging through periodically. https://komoroske.com/sli…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I asked a US Marine who he was loyal to, and he said his unit. Not his country or the military. Did they say that they were specifically not loyal to country or was it simply omitted in their answer?
Yeah he did. "I care about the actual guys I am around, not the idea of the Marines or America. Those are too abstract."
Before you hit around 10 people, you all fit at a comfortable table and can have reasonable meeting where there's a chance for everyone to talk. It's also a reasonable number for one person to manage that size of a team and be able to check in on the others on a regular basis. It's hard not to know the rest of the team - assuming you work in the same place (big assumption these days). It's more likely at this scale that many people have to have broad skillsets in order to work on whatever is necessary.
25-30 is a size where you start to loose track of the names of new people and don't really know some of the team. It's not possible for one person to do a good job managing all the people, so you've probably already started to break things into subgroups and have more mid-level leaders/managers. There are more likely to be specialists at this scale, but it's hard to manage their workload - either too busy or not enough.
As you grow above that size the subdivision and communication issues increase. If you are in an office, you're probably not all in the same room/floor/building. It's likely that there are some people that you almost never see. When someone new is added, you may not meet them for a while. The specialization issues are different. There's more push and pull around what specialist areas to add or drop, but some of the sub teams are more self-sustaining and managing. However when things go poorly, expect re-orgs and layoffs. Loyalties are more to the local team level, not the overall organization. There's more likely some us vs them within the company.
Wouldn't be surprised if this is true also for education. It's bizarre to me that we send children off to these huge warehouse size schools with over 1000 other kids, looked over by a small number of unrelated adults, and expect odd social problems to not arise.
Are all 1000 all together or is it broken down by age/grade, then classroom and such? How about role of parenting?
I think on balance 150-300 per grade is ideal.
Schools that have less than 150 students in a grade just cannot offer students anything other than the same basic actives everyone has. You won't take calculus because there are not enough students to start a calculus class, and this holds back the smart kids futures. You will play football as we cannot field a team without every student there, it doesn't matter how much you would prefer to play any other sport instead we can (not they won't, they cannot) never start a team.
Schools with more than 300 start to get to the point where they can't let students into popular courses/sports and this breeds have/have-not culture wars.
My numbers above are close, but subject to some debate.
Definitely noticed this at Linden Lab. Fewer than 150 people, it felt like a big boisterous sports team with everyone focused on the same goal. Over 150, started noticing infighting, office politics, etc. become more and more of a problem. The irony is, Philip Rosedale often talked about the Dunbar number in relationship to how virtual communities were best formed/organized!
It's a very real phenomenon in my experience and I've also used the moment to really gain separation from competitors as well, since the stumbling is predictable at right around this point.
Once you hit 150 I think you're in the second "something weird" phase, the first happens once you pass about 50 or so.
Below 50, you basically have a flat org. Even with nominal mangers, everyone is effectively on the same team. 50-150 you need an actual management layer, but these managers are all on the same team, and are also close to the ICs on their team so they have the full context of the entire business between the management group. 150+ you need to introduce a manager-of-managers layer which means you have increased overhead across the board in addition the other communication and coordination challenges.