I think there are two different anticipation-constraining-claims, similar but not quite what you said there:
Working Memory Learning Hypothesis – people can learn complex or recursive concepts, but each chunk that they learn cannot be composed of more than 7 other chunks. You can learn a 49 chunk concept but first must distill it into seven 7-chunk-concepts, learn each one, and then combine them together.
Coordination Nuance Hypothesis – there are limits to how nuanced a model you can coordinate around, at various scales of coordination. I’m not sure precisely what the limits are, but it seems quite clear that the more people you are coordinating the harder it is to get them to share a nuanced model or strategy. It’s easier to have a nuanced strategy with 10 people than 100, 1000, or 10,000.
I’m less confident of the Working Memory hypothesis (it’s an armchair inside view based on my understanding of how working memory works)
I’m fairly confident in the Coordination Nuance Hypothesis, which is based on observations about how people actually seem to coordinate at various scales and how much nuance they seem to preserve.
In both cases, there are tools available to improve your ability to learn (as an individual), disseminate information (as a communicator), and keep people organized (as a leader). But none of the tools changed the fundamental equation, just the terms.
Anticipation Constraints:
The anticipation-constraint of the WMLH is “if you try to learn a concept that requires more than 7 chunks, you will fail. If a concept requires 12 chunks, you will not successfully learn it (or will learn a simplified bastardization of it) until you find a way to compress the 12 chunks into 7. If you have to do this yourself, it will take longer than if an educator has optimized it for you in advance.”
The anticipation constraint of the CNH is that if you try to coordinate with 100 people of a given level of intelligence, the shared complexity of the plan that you are enacting will be lower than the complexity of the plan you could enact with 10 people. If you try to implement a more complex plan or orient around a more complex model, your organization will make mistakes due to distorted simplifications of the plan. And this gets worse as your organizations scales.
I agree they are different but think it is the case that with a larger group you have a harder time with either of them, for roughly the same reasons at roughly the same rate of increased difficulty.
The Working Memory Hypothesis says the Bell Labs is useful, in part, because whenever you need to combine multiple interdisciplinary concepts that are each complicated to invent a new concept…
instead of having to read a textbook that explains it one-particular-way (and, if it’s not your field, you’d need to get up to speed on the entire field in order to have any context at all) you can just walk down the hall and ask the guy who invented the concept “how does this work” and have them explain it to you multiple times until they find a way to compress it down into a 7 chunks, optimized for your current level of understanding.
A slightly more accurate anticipation of the CNH is:
people need to spend time learning a thing in order to coordinate around it. At the very least, the more time you need to spend getting people up to speed on a model, the less time they have to actually act on that model
people have idiosyncratic learning styles, and are going to misinterpret some bits of your plan, and you won’t know in advance which ones. Dealing with this requires individual attention, noticing their mistakes and correcting them. Middle managers (and middle “educators” can help to alleviate this, but every link in the chain reduces your control over what message gets distributed. If you need 10,000 people to all understand and act on the same plan/model, it needs to be simple or robust enough to survive 10,000 people misinterpreting it in slightly different ways
This gets even worse if you need to change your plan over time in response to new information, since now people are getting it confused with the old plan, or they don’t agree with the new plan because they signed up for the old plan, and then you have to Do Politics to get them on board with the new plan.
At the very least, if you’ve coordinated perfectly, each time you change your plan you need to shift from “focusing on execution” to “focusing on getting people up to speed on the new model.”
I think there are two different anticipation-constraining-claims, similar but not quite what you said there:
Working Memory Learning Hypothesis – people can learn complex or recursive concepts, but each chunk that they learn cannot be composed of more than 7 other chunks. You can learn a 49 chunk concept but first must distill it into seven 7-chunk-concepts, learn each one, and then combine them together.
Coordination Nuance Hypothesis – there are limits to how nuanced a model you can coordinate around, at various scales of coordination. I’m not sure precisely what the limits are, but it seems quite clear that the more people you are coordinating the harder it is to get them to share a nuanced model or strategy. It’s easier to have a nuanced strategy with 10 people than 100, 1000, or 10,000.
I’m less confident of the Working Memory hypothesis (it’s an armchair inside view based on my understanding of how working memory works)
I’m fairly confident in the Coordination Nuance Hypothesis, which is based on observations about how people actually seem to coordinate at various scales and how much nuance they seem to preserve.
In both cases, there are tools available to improve your ability to learn (as an individual), disseminate information (as a communicator), and keep people organized (as a leader). But none of the tools changed the fundamental equation, just the terms.
Anticipation Constraints:
The anticipation-constraint of the WMLH is “if you try to learn a concept that requires more than 7 chunks, you will fail. If a concept requires 12 chunks, you will not successfully learn it (or will learn a simplified bastardization of it) until you find a way to compress the 12 chunks into 7. If you have to do this yourself, it will take longer than if an educator has optimized it for you in advance.”
The anticipation constraint of the CNH is that if you try to coordinate with 100 people of a given level of intelligence, the shared complexity of the plan that you are enacting will be lower than the complexity of the plan you could enact with 10 people. If you try to implement a more complex plan or orient around a more complex model, your organization will make mistakes due to distorted simplifications of the plan. And this gets worse as your organizations scales.
CNH is still ambiguous between “nuanced plan” and “nuanced model” here, and those seem extremely different to me.
I agree they are different but think it is the case that with a larger group you have a harder time with either of them, for roughly the same reasons at roughly the same rate of increased difficulty.
The Working Memory Hypothesis says the Bell Labs is useful, in part, because whenever you need to combine multiple interdisciplinary concepts that are each complicated to invent a new concept…
instead of having to read a textbook that explains it one-particular-way (and, if it’s not your field, you’d need to get up to speed on the entire field in order to have any context at all) you can just walk down the hall and ask the guy who invented the concept “how does this work” and have them explain it to you multiple times until they find a way to compress it down into a 7 chunks, optimized for your current level of understanding.
A slightly more accurate anticipation of the CNH is:
people need to spend time learning a thing in order to coordinate around it. At the very least, the more time you need to spend getting people up to speed on a model, the less time they have to actually act on that model
people have idiosyncratic learning styles, and are going to misinterpret some bits of your plan, and you won’t know in advance which ones. Dealing with this requires individual attention, noticing their mistakes and correcting them. Middle managers (and middle “educators” can help to alleviate this, but every link in the chain reduces your control over what message gets distributed. If you need 10,000 people to all understand and act on the same plan/model, it needs to be simple or robust enough to survive 10,000 people misinterpreting it in slightly different ways
This gets even worse if you need to change your plan over time in response to new information, since now people are getting it confused with the old plan, or they don’t agree with the new plan because they signed up for the old plan, and then you have to Do Politics to get them on board with the new plan.
At the very least, if you’ve coordinated perfectly, each time you change your plan you need to shift from “focusing on execution” to “focusing on getting people up to speed on the new model.”