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Organization

Dunbar's Number

Cognitive Scaling Limit.

The article

If

Humans can maintain approximately 150 stable social relationships. Dunbar's result is about neocortex size and group size across primates — it is not about work teams. What engineering extrapolates from it is a separate argument: communication channels grow as n(n-1)/2, so past the size where everyone can still hold everyone else's context, added people go into coordination rather than output.

Then

When a team exceeds 7±2 people, split it. If "information-sharing meetings" start multiplying, that's the symptom of exceeding the cognitive limit.

Unless

Two-Pizza Rule / Team Topologies

Source

Robin I. M. Dunbar, Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates (Journal of Human Evolution, 1992). The smaller team-size figures usually quoted alongside it — 7±2, the two-pizza rule — are folklore rather than Dunbar's finding.

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See also