Why Trusted Space?

Why will those that use Trusted Space ultimately crush organizations that rely on the traditional model? Why should you be worried if you run a traditional organization? Why should you be hopeful if  you run a Trusted Space instead?

I had an aha on the lawn mower today. The issue is complexity. It appears that the Internet has shifted the rate of the increase in human social complexity exponentially by collapsing time and space as barriers to connection.  But traditional organizations are designed around a machine metaphor that can only cope with "Knowns". They cannot cope with the scale of complexity that we all face today as the Internet is changing all the rules and all the givens in all fields.

Our traditional organizations simply cannot cope with what the Internet has done. So why will organizations based on Trusted Space work instead?

The world of Mates and Fellowship is the product of Trusted Space and Mates and Fellows can and will run rings around the conventional. Why?

Machine organizations offer only a minute fraction of potential. Traditional organizations are like early steam engines - mainly noise heat and friction. Mates on the other hand are like small nuclear reactors. They release the atomic energy that resides inside all humans

OK enough metaphors - why is this so? Because as the conventional organization scales up beyond 150 and ignores the smaller units of natural human design of 8, 15 and 40, friction increases exponentially leading to the point of diminishing returns. Organizations that violate the rule of 150 have to use authoritarian management or rules. Trust is squeezed out by authoritarian culture.

So by cultural definition created by organizational design - any organization that works through rules versus trust becomes increasingly incompetent when faced with complexity. That makes all large organizations today vulnerable.

Trusted Spaces create conditions where each person can be who they really are - therefore the whole person and all their energy is available. Even better this energy reacts with the energy of others as in a nuclear reaction and provides the energetic equivalent of a reaction. TNT versus a hydrogen bomb!

If I am right - then my bet is that we will find as we study Trusted Spaces more - that we will also find that they abide by the laws of Magic Numbers.

Traditional organizations, except for the military (see follow on from Dunbar), pay no attention at all to Magic Numbers. Hence they have to use a bureaucratic model that cannot tolerate any deviance from the set norm - hence they cannot cope with complexity.

Is this why so many in bureaucracies today are so busy - all motion and no movement! What does this insight mean then for HR and for business schools who enforce the dogma? What does this mean for the entire idea of "efficiency". Efficiency may have a role but for instance neither GM or Ford have found it much help. Nor does the US Military in Iraq.

Aha you say a hole in Rob's argument - the military is the only organization that uses Magic Numbers - yes but the "Military is run not by itself using the chain of command but by a huge top down bureaucracy that takes all power away from the unit commanders. And who is fighting the IDF and the US Army? Organizations that abide by the rules of Mates and Fellowship! How big are their units? I bet we will find they abide by the rules of Magic Numbers.

Ross Mayfield has really thought about structure and relatedness and creativity. Here is one of his views on this.

It's not just me that is looking to a better understanding of magic numbers and their connection to creativity and their ability to cope with complexity

My bet is that in years to come we will see clearly that we when breach Magic Numbers the cost in friction rises quickly to reduce productivity to near zero and the capability to cope with complexity to a minus.

" it turns out that most organised (i.e. professional) armies have a basic unit of about 150 men (Table 3). This was as true of the Roman Army (both before and after the reforms of 104BC) as of modern armies since the sixteenth century. In the Roman Army of the classical period (350-100 BC), the basic unit was the maniple (or "double-century") which normally consisted of 120-130 men; following the reforms instituted by Marius in 104BC, the army was re-organised into legions, each of which contained a number of semi-independent centuries of 100 men each (Haverfield 1955, Montross 1975). The smallest independent unit in modern armies (the company) invariably contains 100-200 men (normally three or four rifle platoons of 30-40 men each, plus a headquarters unit, sometimes with an additional heavy weapons unit) (Table 3). Although its origins date back to the German mercenary Landsknechts groups of the sixteenth century, the modern company really derives from the military reforms of the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus in the 1620s. Despite subsequent increases in size to accommodate new developments in weaponry and tactics, the company in all modern armies has remained within the 95% confident limits of the predicted size for human groups. The mean size of 179.6 for the twentieth century armies listed in Table 3 does not differ significantly from the 147.8 predicted by equation (1) (z=0.913, P=0.361 2-tailed).   This fact has particular significance in the context of the present argument. Military units have to function very efficiently in coordinating men's behaviour on the battlefield: the price of failing to do so is extremely high and military commanders cannot afford to miscalculate. Given that the fighting power of a unit is a function of its size, we might expect there to be considerable selection pressure in favour of units that are as large as possible. That the smallest independent unit should turn out to have a maximum size of about 200 even in modern armies (where technology presumably facilitates the coordination of planning) suggests that this upper limit is set by the number of individuals who can work effectively together as a coordinated team. Military planners have presumably arrived at this figure as a result of trial and error over the centuries. In the context of the present analysis, the reason given by the Hutterites for limiting their communities to 150 is particularly illuminating. They explicitly state that when the number of individuals is much larger than this, it becomes difficult to control their behaviour by means of peer pressure alone (Hardin 1988). Rather than create a police force, they prefer to split the community. Forge (1972) came to a rather similar conclusion on the basis of an analysis of settlement size and structure among contemporary New Guinea "neolithic" cultivators. He argued that the figure 150 was a key threshold in community size in these societies. When communities exceed this size, he suggested, basic relationships of kinship and affinity were insufficient to maintain social cohesion; stability could then be maintained only if formal structures developed which defined specific roles within society. In other words, large communities were invariably hierarchically structured in some way, whereas small communities were not. Similarly, in an analysis of data from 30 societies ranging from hunter-gatherers to large-scale agriculturalists, Naroll (1956) demonstrated that there was a simple power relationship between the maximum settlement size observed in a given society and both the number of occupational specialities and the number of organisational structures recorded for it. His analyses suggest that there is a critical threshold at a maximum settlement size of 500 beyond which social cohesion can only be maintained if there is an appropriate number of authoritarian officials. Bearing in mind that Naroll's threshold is expressed as the maximum observed settlement size, it seems likely that the equivalent mean settlement size will not be too far from the value of 150 suggested by the above analyses. Other evidence suggests that 150 may be a functional limit on interacting groups even in contemporary western industrial societies. Much of the sociometric research on industrial and other comparable organisations, for example, has demonstrated that there is a marked negative effect of group size on both group cohesion and job satisfaction (as indicated by absenteeism and turnover in posts) within the size range under consideration (i.e. 50-500 individuals: see, for example, Indik 1965, Porter & Lawler 1965, Silverman 1970). Indeed, an informal rule in business organisation identifies 150 as the critical limit for the effective coordination of tasks and information-flow through direct person-to-person links: companies larger than this cannot function effectively without sub-structuring to define channels of communication and responsibility (J.-M. Delwart, pers. commun.). Terrien & Mills (1955), for example, found that the larger the organisation, the greater the number of control officials that is needed to ensure its smooth functioning. Other studies have suggested that there is an upper limit on the number of social contacts that can be regularly maintained within a group. Coleman (1964) presented data on friendships among print shop workers which suggest that the likelihood of having friends within the workplace reaches an asymptote at a shop size of 90-150 individuals. (The small size of the sample for large groups makes it difficult to identify the precise point at which "saturation" is reached.) Coleman explicitly argued that this was a consequence of the fact that there is a limit to the number of individuals within a shop that any one person can come into contact with. Moreover, his results also seemed to suggest that the large number of regular interactants that an individual can expect to have within a large work group limits the number of additional friendships that can be made outside the workplace."                               © Copyright 2003 Robert Paterson.