I really appreciate the start-up example. Over the last few years I felt first-hand what it was like to work at a company as it grew from ~60 people to ~130 people, as informal communication and common-knowledge building broke down and management hadn’t yet put in more formal structures (which eventually took a change in management to achieve). Over the course of that period, I regularly talked about this with my co-workers, and explicitly framed it in terms of Dunbar’s number (a concept I generally had to explain as well), but without buy-in from the C-level no subset of us was able to effect stable change.
The fact that we’ve lost so several society-wide coordination mechanisms that took centuries to build up is really scary.
I really appreciate the start-up example. Over the last few years I felt first-hand what it was like to work at a company as it grew from ~60 people to ~130 people, as informal communication and common-knowledge building broke down and management hadn’t yet put in more formal structures (which eventually took a change in management to achieve). Over the course of that period, I regularly talked about this with my co-workers, and explicitly framed it in terms of Dunbar’s number (a concept I generally had to explain as well), but without buy-in from the C-level no subset of us was able to effect stable change.
The fact that we’ve lost so several society-wide coordination mechanisms that took centuries to build up is really scary.