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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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