Too big to groom
Much has been written about the optimal size for communities and business organizations.
As we discussed a few months ago, primatologist Robin Dunbar says any group becomes inefficient when it exceeds approximately 150 members. Coincidentally, many businesses—like W.L. Gore and Brazil’s Semco—have discovered on their own that when one of their organizations exceeds that size it loses its sense of community and needs to be split into smaller units. (Dunbar has also found that three to five is the optimal number for intimate friends, which—as I’ve pointed out before—happens to fit the size of most rock bands and small business teams.)
But until this week I had missed the evolutionary link behind Dunbar’s numbers. In his anthropological research he discovered that when communities of primates began to exceed 150, it weakened their social bonding based on their ability to groom each other’s fur!
Suddenly some things I've observed as a management consultant make sense. For instance, whenever I worked with mining and manufacturing sites that exceeded 150 workers I was always mystified by the fact that employees seemed totally uninterested in combing each other’s hair. Perhaps you’ve noticed this too.