When organisations and groups are small, it is possible for the people in charge to understand the dynamics and treat everyone as individuals. The key person can have lunch with every new joiner. They may even have a role in picking all of them. Work with all of them at times. Know their names. Understand the complexity of their story. In small groups, each combination of members has its own character. Each combination of two. Each combination of three. Four. Five. When it is relatively small, you don’t need prejudice. You don’t need roles. You don’t need grades. You don’t need standardised controls and comparisons. As soon as an organisation gets beyond a certain fuzzy size, it needs to turn into an institution. Every decision becomes precedent setting. You need to be able to articulate reasons, cause, effect, and attribute value add to ensure fairness. A friend of mine regularly tells his kids, “If life was fair, you would be far worse off”. There are benefits to scale, but there is danger in turning people into numbers. Dunbar’s Number is a theoretical limit to the number of people with whom an individual can sustain meaningful social relationships. It is usually considered somewhere around 150. Who are the 150 people you understand reasonably well as individuals?
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