Goodbye/Hello 18 "Make Sure That This Never Happens Again"

2010 will go down as the year the phrase "Make Sure That This Never Happens Again" was the constant refrain. We heard this is the financial banking fiasco, the mortgage meltdown, and the BP gulf oil spill environmental and economic catastrophe. And now the latest in the Arlington Cemetery where botched record keeping, or that lack there of, gives families no peace of mind that their loved ones are buried in the graves bearing their name.

This is a collective failure again and again to hold any responsibility for actions. Which leads to a larger question. How can we make sure the any of this "will never happen again"? There seems to be something dysfunctional going on in our culture that keeps repeating the same outcome. Have things gotten too big where responsibility for actions have become blurry and the border between right and wrong is too easily breached?

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar has done extensive research in the area of human group size. For humans, the max group size is 147.8, or about 150. This figure seems to represent the maximum amount of people that we can have a real social relationship with - knowing who another human is and how they relate to us. Military planners have used this principal over the years. A functional fighting unit is never more than 200 people. Behavior can be controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct person-to-person contacts. With larger groups, this seems impossible. The religious group known as the Hutterites realized through trial and error that the maximum size of a colony should be no more than 150 people. Every time a colony approached this number the colony was divided into two colonies. They have found that once a group becomes larger than that, "people become strangers to one another."

Another great example is Gore Associates, a privately held multimillion-dollar company responsible for creating Gore-Tex fabric and all sorts of other high tech computer cables, filter bags, semiconductors, pharmaceutical, and medical products. Wilbert Gore - the late founder of the company, found through trial and error that 150 employees per plant was most ideal. "We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty," he told an interviewer some years ago. What is most unique about this company is that each company plant is no larger than 150. When constructing a plant, they put 150 spaces in the parking lot, and when people start parking on the grass, they know it's time for another plant. Each plant works as a group.
Is this possible in huge multi-national corporations? It may be the only way we can keep ourselves in check. The "too big to fail" model we have now is not working. People have lost a sense of responsibility and that is becoming increasingly dangerous in a world that has become more interconnected than ever before. What effects one group can rapidly impact other groups. Dunbar maintained that if each unit is separated, especially if there are hundreds or thousands of people involved, complex systems of organizations will be required to keep everyone in check. He pointed out that when people have personal relationships as they do in smaller groups they will live up to the expectations of their peers. Peer pressure is much more powerful than the somehow vague concept of a boss or punishment.

What has become more and more evident with each passing day is that we cannot buck how our brains are hard wired. It is most functional and responsible when it has relationships with 150 people. Any more than that and we go into dysfunction and begin to lose a sense of common purpose. Above 150 we take less responsibility for our actions, make bad judgment calls, take risks we shouldn't, and generally make a mess of things. We have to break ourselves down into smaller, more responsible pods. Otherwise we will keep running a muck causing a lot of global instability. And that is the last thing all of us need, want, or can afford in a world that is so interrelated.

Goodbye to the "too big to fail" model
Hello to the "150" model

Goodbye to the organizational hierarchies that create irresponsibility
Hello to personal peer relationships that promote responsibility

Goodbye to bigger is better
Hello to smaller is saner

 

Comments

[jhNY]

05:00 PM on 06/13/2010

Not wishing to cast aspersions in the direction of research like Dunbar's, but I must object: the big problem we face as a society of a few hundred million is not that humans cannot function cohesively or resposibly when their organizati­onal size passes 150, the problem we've got is that the heads of one failed institutio­n after another have not stepped down or faced prosecutio­n or censure, but instead, have kept their gigs, their salaries, their social positions and their wealth-- often accumulate­d under dubious cicumstanc­es. Were the heads of failed institutio­ns to behave as their predecesso­rs had done, they would have stepped down, and new heads with new thoughts and priorities would have taken their place. And that's our proble. The old limits of shame and personal responsibi­lty no longer constrain our leaders-- they've moved well past them.....

[b525]

03:05 PM on 06/13/2010

DOES ANYONE WONDER WHY THEY DON'T DRILL THE RELIEF WELLS NEXT TO THESE OIL WELLS BEFORE THEY EVEN START BRINGING UP OIL?.....S­O IF THERE IS AN OIL LEAK THEY CAN IMMEDIATEL­Y UTILIZE THE RELIEF WELL TO STOP THE LEAK.

WE ARE NOW WAITING MONTHS FOR A RELIEF WELL TO BE DRILLED NEXT TO THE ORIGINAL WELL TO STOP THE PRESENT LEAK.

WHY WASN'T THIS RELIEF WELL DRILLED WHEN THEY DRILLED THE ORIGINAL OIL WELL SO IT WOULD BE READY IN CASE OF A LEAK?

I'VE REPEATEDLY READ POSTS ON THE INTERNET THAT THIS IS ALREADY REQUIRED BY LAW IN CANADA AND OTHER COUNTRIES.

[Bobotheclown]

04:14 PM on 06/13/2010

It is not done because it is very expensive to drill holes in the bottom of the ocean. A well run business that is allowed to put profits before safety is obliged to do so. Don't blame BP for following the rules. Blame the people who make dumb rules. Corporatio­ns are the easiest thing in the world to manage because they have a transparen­t goal, the maximizati­on of profit. Create rules that effect profit and all corporatio­ns will change behavior. Of course corporatio­ns are not standing still. They will buy off political leaders as a cost of doing business if it is legal and if it produces larger profits, which of course it does. So now that corporatio­ns use bribes (lobbyists­) to legally create easy rules for them to work with, rules that place corporate efficiency above public safety, what do the rest of us do? The disadvanta­ged people effected by oil spills such as the BP Gulf incident will never have the money to outbid the corporatio­ns in the political auction. The same laws that allow BP to take risks allow BP to declare bankruptcy to get out from under liability. These are the legal rules in place and no one in government is going to change those rules, so what are the effected people to do? There are only two political parties and both of them ran a corporate appologist in the 2008 election. The people picked the lesser of two evils, a rational, but ultimately ineffectiv­e choice.