The most fundamental questions for all organisations are about numbers. Is there a point when economies of scale are negated by the costs of bureaucracy and alienation? How many people can you admit to a meeting before it becomes a waste of time? What is the optimum size for a committee? Or a panel? Or a board?
Such relationships depend on the ability of animals to figure out how others will behave and how to interact with predicted behaviour. That skill requires considerable computational power – in other words, a big brain. The social brain hypothesis dictates that the size of the group that primates form will be limited by the average size of their brains. For humans the group size is 148 – or 150 for convenience.Having hit on the magic number, Dunbar noticed that it kept coming up everywhere.
The authors emphasise the importance of matching the size of the group to the task at hand – something that ought to be obvious but is ignored with surprising frequency. If you need to make decisions fast, as in crisis management or creative development, five is a good number. If you want to make complex decisions, then 12 to 15 is a better size, since it provides more perspectives. Work groups can contain six to 12 people, provided that each person knows his or her role and the agenda is clear.
The danger is that companies will be so focused on economies of scale that they lazily add more managers without recognising the costs this exacts in bureaucratisation, alienation and free-riding. Faces disappear into the crowd. Meetings multiply and metastasise. People become functions . “We” becomes “us” and “them”.only add to the sense of alienation and impersonality.
This is Dunbar's number suggested by evolutionary psychologist RobinDunbar. The Dunbar Number is applied by the Gore company since decades.