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My experience from the army, a startup growing to 100 or so (majority remote, or local offices), hanging out in online communities which grow beyond 120, is tha

My experience from the army, a startup growing to 100 or so (majority remote, or local offices), hanging out in online communities which grow beyond 120, is that around 100-130 it gets hard to keep track of all the people and have some emotional relationship. Without that relationship it gets harder for me to care about the progress the group makes as a unit. Interestingly enough, for me it is based on context. It is ok to have 100 people in the company, 100 people in an online community and 100 people in an off line community, all at the same time, and still keep track and have some kind of relationship. When a context grows too large it doesn’t seem to affect the other contexts.

dalbasal 5y ago
I agree that there are elements like this that make intuitive sense. What I am saying is: After at these years on military/boardroom slides... what does Dunbar's tell us? How has it influenced how we do anything? What should or shouldn't be organized in smaller/larger groups? How? It just feels like a lot of popular social science tidbits give us a great introduction with no follow through. What was the point of all those slides?
- bjelkeman-again 5y ago
  To me it fits into the experience that as a team goes through growth, you need to adjust your team communications/management as you grow. Roughly: 7 people, 15, 35-42, 100ish. Where the Dunbar number is just the top number. (Which tells me I need to pull out Vern Harnish’s Scaling Up, again).
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    Ok, but where does Dunbar add insight. What would be different in our approach without Dunbar?
    - bjelkeman-again 5y ago
      It confirmed my observations about teams of 100+ people. It serves a purpose for me as a way to start discussing the issue of communications and management within a team. Not a huge thing, like many things. But it is a useful pice of a puzzle that works, for me.
    - WorldMaker 5y ago
      That's a bit of a chicken-and-egg question here, too. Armies have been organized around no more than 100/150 people in a single "unit"/"team" for millennia, prior to any of Dunbar's research much less "Dunbar's Number". There were a lot of observed practical concerns that led to that number, some of which are unrelated such as top-down command structures, but some of which would be direct observations of similar (if not the exact same) phenomenon that Dunbar studied. In this case Dunbar's Number gives us far more insight into why armies have organized that way for millennia than the other way around (telling them how to organize). One group discovered it practically and Dunbar theorized about if that was just a practical local maxima or if it was a more global maximum. What becomes different in our approach post-Dunbar's Number is the added perspective of: not only has this been proven to work in millennia of military practice, but in theory we know it is a theoretical barrier in far more social situations than just those that also have confounding factors like top-down management.
ItsMonkk 5y ago
I've been trying to figure this out too. My insights actually started from a post made here, where someone talked about post 'weirdness'. There are so many posts that we skim all of the time. If there is a post that is weird, we skip it. If there is a thread that is weird, we collapse it. What I realized however, if that weirdness is coming from the people who are here all the time, at the top of the karma charts, and people see their name all of the time and respect their opinions, that you can become more weird. And so as the community grows and as you communicate with more people, as you see the same person less and less often, the ability to be weird drops. The larger a community, the less it can move as a cohesive unit, the less it can find new ideas. So what we're really looking at is how Metcalfe's law clashes with the Overton window. That's why Dunbar's number is a thing. As we communicate we subtly change our opinions, and when a group becomes to large, the communication scaling at a factorial rate eventually meets its limit. You end up with a group that believes different ideas, and therefore the best thing to do is split. We don't see the splits in existing social media because even though the Overton Window is smaller and smaller with larger and larger numbers, more and more people are being pulled into it, and exponentially more people are tossed aside.
- bjelkeman-again 5y ago
  I’m still surprised the discourse at HN is reasonably decent still. I do think we end up with majority issues where a cultural bias from a larger population will define “how it is”. But it isn’t too bad.

dalbasal 5y ago

I agree that there are elements like this that make intuitive sense. What I am saying is: After at these years on military/boardroom slides... what does Dunbar's tell us? How has it influenced how we do anything? What should or shouldn't be organized in smaller/larger groups? How? It just feels like a lot of popular social science tidbits give us a great introduction with no follow through. What was the point of all those slides?

bjelkeman-again 5y ago
To me it fits into the experience that as a team goes through growth, you need to adjust your team communications/management as you grow. Roughly: 7 people, 15, 35-42, 100ish. Where the Dunbar number is just the top number. (Which tells me I need to pull out Vern Harnish’s Scaling Up, again).
- dalbasal 5y ago
  Ok, but where does Dunbar add insight. What would be different in our approach without Dunbar?
  - bjelkeman-again 5y ago
    It confirmed my observations about teams of 100+ people. It serves a purpose for me as a way to start discussing the issue of communications and management within a team. Not a huge thing, like many things. But it is a useful pice of a puzzle that works, for me.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    That's a bit of a chicken-and-egg question here, too. Armies have been organized around no more than 100/150 people in a single "unit"/"team" for millennia, prior to any of Dunbar's research much less "Dunbar's Number". There were a lot of observed practical concerns that led to that number, some of which are unrelated such as top-down command structures, but some of which would be direct observations of similar (if not the exact same) phenomenon that Dunbar studied. In this case Dunbar's Number gives us far more insight into why armies have organized that way for millennia than the other way around (telling them how to organize). One group discovered it practically and Dunbar theorized about if that was just a practical local maxima or if it was a more global maximum. What becomes different in our approach post-Dunbar's Number is the added perspective of: not only has this been proven to work in millennia of military practice, but in theory we know it is a theoretical barrier in far more social situations than just those that also have confounding factors like top-down management.

ItsMonkk 5y ago

I've been trying to figure this out too. My insights actually started from a post made here, where someone talked about post 'weirdness'. There are so many posts that we skim all of the time. If there is a post that is weird, we skip it. If there is a thread that is weird, we collapse it. What I realized however, if that weirdness is coming from the people who are here all the time, at the top of the karma charts, and people see their name all of the time and respect their opinions, that you can become more weird. And so as the community grows and as you communicate with more people, as you see the same person less and less often, the ability to be weird drops. The larger a community, the less it can move as a cohesive unit, the less it can find new ideas. So what we're really looking at is how Metcalfe's law clashes with the Overton window. That's why Dunbar's number is a thing. As we communicate we subtly change our opinions, and when a group becomes to large, the communication scaling at a factorial rate eventually meets its limit. You end up with a group that believes different ideas, and therefore the best thing to do is split. We don't see the splits in existing social media because even though the Overton Window is smaller and smaller with larger and larger numbers, more and more people are being pulled into it, and exponentially more people are tossed aside.

bjelkeman-again 5y ago
I’m still surprised the discourse at HN is reasonably decent still. I do think we end up with majority issues where a cultural bias from a larger population will define “how it is”. But it isn’t too bad.