This is very interesting and a lot rings true. I particularly like your examples of how “Embarrassed Cults” are trying to appear, that makes the concepts really click.
I’m curious about why the lines in your graph curve, rather than being firm size limits. I feel like I understand the Robert’s Limit… something about how Roberts Rules start breaking in meetings of a dozen without someone “in charge,” but can function for larger meetings when someone wields more authority? I could see a similar/opposite point that you don’t need structure in small cliques, but with someone ’lightly in charge” you can avoid structure up to 25-30. Either seems reasonable.
I’m more confused about the Dunbar number curving, even in fairly authoritarian systems you should still be able to know and maintain personal relationships with other members of the group. There’s also the implication that a Guild could be a reasonable format for 50-100 people if mostly egalitarian, but hits size limits as the leader takes on more authority, which seems the opposite of what I’d expect.
I could see a similar/opposite point that you don’t need structure in small cliques, but with someone ’lightly in charge” you can avoid structure up to 25-30.
Yeah, I think this is what I’m getting at. Robert’s Rules says there’s no real point in formality if the group is about 12 or fewer; this defines the minimum size at which the group will think adopting formal rules is a good idea. More authoritarian groups can postpone that discussion till later.
I’m more confused about the Dunbar number curving, even in fairly authoritarian systems you should still be able to know and maintain personal relationships with other members of the group. There’s also the implication that a Guild could be a reasonable format for 50-100 people if mostly egalitarian, but hits size limits as the leader takes on more authority, which seems the opposite of what I’d expect.
My intuition is: That line represents the point at which people start thinking “This bureaucratic structure is too cumbersome to get anything done with this many people; we therefore need strong leaders who can act through personal authority rather than merely bureaucratically-delegated authority.” I.e., the guild starts turning into a cult. And the population threshold at which people will give up on the guild structure will be lower the more authoritarian the culture.
Example, but only by analogy since it’s not really an “association” in the same sense—Because of their egalitarian culture, towns in New England will maintain an “open town meeting” form of government (which functions like a guild) up to a population of about 6,000 or so, whereas in less egalitarian parts of the country a village will incorporate itself into a town with a mayor (which is sort-of like a cult) at a much lower population threshold.
(Maybe the name is confusing. I’m being a bit cheeky calling the line “Dunbar’s Limit”, since it’s named after its x-intercept, i.e. “Dunbar’s Number”, which is just the number 150. That is, you can have 150 personal acquaintances regardless of whether you’re in a guild or a cult; it’s just that 150 is the point at which even the most staunch egalitarians will give up on trying to keep it a guild.)
I’m less sure about what the clique/cult boundary represents. Maybe that’s more of a gradual transition.
Yeah, I think this is what I’m getting at. Robert’s Rules says there’s no real point in formality if the group is about 12 or fewer; this defines the minimum size at which the group will think adopting formal rules is a good idea. More authoritarian groups can postpone that discussion till later.
Valid, this makes sense.
My intuition is: That line represents the point at which people start thinking “This bureaucratic structure is too cumbersome to get anything done with this many people; we therefore need strong leaders who can act through personal authority rather than merely bureaucratically-delegated authority.” I.e., the guild starts turning into a cult. And the population threshold at which people will give up on the guild structure will be lower the more authoritarian the culture.
Interesting. I took you to be riffing off of a phase diagram, yes? My intuition was that the Dunbar Curve should slope the other way, at least for part of the range. If a guild of 120 people exists, it likely has more structure and more empowered leadership than a guild of 40. But most organizations that I’d think of as analogous to guilds simply fail if they grow faster than their organizational capabilities. There could be some margin at which surviving organizations necessarily become cults if they get too authoritarian to manage their membership, but I think there are plenty of examples of groups in the ~200 person range that use Robert’s Rules type structures, notably committees, to maintain coherence with moderate levels of leadership authority.
I almost want to add another category to the graph, for groups too big and disorganized to still be guilds, but too lacking of leadership to be proper cults. Leaderless mobs? Maybe this is just a special case of cult, though.
Eagerly looking forward to more of your sequence on this. I imagine it will make some of these distinctions more clear.
(This is speculative on my part, since I have no personal experience with groups like this.)
A group of type #5 is really no cult at all (since there’s no leader), but a “mob” as you say. I was only calling it a “fractious cult” because the most common way to end up there is a large cult suddenly becoming much more egalitarian upon the loss of their leader. But I suppose it could also result from a guild growing too rapidly and carelessly. In any case, a mob is inherently unstable, and will quickly decay into something else.
In a perfect guild, every member carries around a mental model of every other member, which they consult whenever acting on behalf of the group. This can only work up to a size of 150, since it’s simply not possible to carry around more mental models than that (hence Dunbar’s Number). Therefore it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate broad sweeping authority to “standing committees” (etc.) that are less-than-perfectly accountable to the group, and have to use their own judgement in a lot of cases. Plenary meetings become increasingly rare and performative. In that respect it starts to take on certain culty characteristics, and so it’s an “imperfect guild”. On the other hand it’s not really a cult either; I don’t know where that boundary is. It may overlap with #8 somewhat.
The significance of the “phase boundaries” is that it takes a lot of “energy” to pass through them, and so groups will often break up or stagnate rather than do this. This is why the direction of the slope is meaningful. So e.g. when a growing clique approaches Robert’s Limit from the left, the more egalitarian-leaning members will believe it’s imperative to cross the boundary now (i.e. draw up a guild charter), whereas the more authoritarian-leaning members will think this is unnecessary. Therefore the group will either try to avoid exposing the division by ceasing to grow, or else break up, thus bouncing off the boundary.
Likewise, I imagine that when a growing guild approaches Dunbar’s Limit from the left, the authoritarian members will already be exceeding their mental-modeling-capacity and will thus think it’s necessary to cross the boundary (by appointing a standing committee or whatever), whereas the egalitarian members will insist on stretching their mental-modeling-capacity as far as possible in order to avoid compromising the “perfection” of the guild.
My intuition is: That line represents the point at which people start thinking “This bureaucratic structure is too cumbersome to get anything done with this many people; we therefore need strong leaders who can act through personal authority rather than merely bureaucratically-delegated authority.” I.e., the guild starts turning into a cult.
I wonder how often it would work better for guilds that grow too large to explicitly split apart. My intuition is that there should be a norm that growing guilds should split apart (and, where applicable, appoint representatives to a higher level org. to coordinate—initially a clique but later a guild if the number of base level guilds increases).
Splitting a guild in half may be difficult because some number of close 1:1 connections are going to be broken no matter where the line is drawn. Instead what may end up happening is that the guild undermines its own unifying principle and shatters into dozens of small cliques, and now there are 0 guilds.
The unfortunate reality (and what motivated me to write this post) is that sometimes an organization will find itself constrained by its past choices, with no viable way forward. A guild of 200 may wish it could’ve been two guilds of 100 instead, but the time to make that decision was when they were contemplating adding their 101st member, not now. (Similarly, a group of 60 may find itself in “embarrassed cult” territory and wish it could become a guild, but really they should’ve done that a long time ago.)
Maybe the ideal setup for a large community would be something like the “colleges within a university” system, where the university has a rule that each college may not grow beyond a certain size. So, as the existing colleges fill up, there will be a growing population of unaffiliated hangers-on who will eventually be able to form their own college.
(Again, I’m only speculating here since I have no personal experience with groups this large.)
This is very interesting and a lot rings true. I particularly like your examples of how “Embarrassed Cults” are trying to appear, that makes the concepts really click.
I’m curious about why the lines in your graph curve, rather than being firm size limits. I feel like I understand the Robert’s Limit… something about how Roberts Rules start breaking in meetings of a dozen without someone “in charge,” but can function for larger meetings when someone wields more authority? I could see a similar/opposite point that you don’t need structure in small cliques, but with someone ’lightly in charge” you can avoid structure up to 25-30. Either seems reasonable.
I’m more confused about the Dunbar number curving, even in fairly authoritarian systems you should still be able to know and maintain personal relationships with other members of the group. There’s also the implication that a Guild could be a reasonable format for 50-100 people if mostly egalitarian, but hits size limits as the leader takes on more authority, which seems the opposite of what I’d expect.
I’m looking forward to the rest of this sequence.
Yeah, I think this is what I’m getting at. Robert’s Rules says there’s no real point in formality if the group is about 12 or fewer; this defines the minimum size at which the group will think adopting formal rules is a good idea. More authoritarian groups can postpone that discussion till later.
My intuition is: That line represents the point at which people start thinking “This bureaucratic structure is too cumbersome to get anything done with this many people; we therefore need strong leaders who can act through personal authority rather than merely bureaucratically-delegated authority.” I.e., the guild starts turning into a cult. And the population threshold at which people will give up on the guild structure will be lower the more authoritarian the culture.
Example, but only by analogy since it’s not really an “association” in the same sense—Because of their egalitarian culture, towns in New England will maintain an “open town meeting” form of government (which functions like a guild) up to a population of about 6,000 or so, whereas in less egalitarian parts of the country a village will incorporate itself into a town with a mayor (which is sort-of like a cult) at a much lower population threshold.
(Maybe the name is confusing. I’m being a bit cheeky calling the line “Dunbar’s Limit”, since it’s named after its x-intercept, i.e. “Dunbar’s Number”, which is just the number 150. That is, you can have 150 personal acquaintances regardless of whether you’re in a guild or a cult; it’s just that 150 is the point at which even the most staunch egalitarians will give up on trying to keep it a guild.)
I’m less sure about what the clique/cult boundary represents. Maybe that’s more of a gradual transition.
Valid, this makes sense.
Interesting. I took you to be riffing off of a phase diagram, yes? My intuition was that the Dunbar Curve should slope the other way, at least for part of the range. If a guild of 120 people exists, it likely has more structure and more empowered leadership than a guild of 40. But most organizations that I’d think of as analogous to guilds simply fail if they grow faster than their organizational capabilities. There could be some margin at which surviving organizations necessarily become cults if they get too authoritarian to manage their membership, but I think there are plenty of examples of groups in the ~200 person range that use Robert’s Rules type structures, notably committees, to maintain coherence with moderate levels of leadership authority.
I almost want to add another category to the graph, for groups too big and disorganized to still be guilds, but too lacking of leadership to be proper cults. Leaderless mobs? Maybe this is just a special case of cult, though.
Eagerly looking forward to more of your sequence on this. I imagine it will make some of these distinctions more clear.
How about this as a synthesis:
(This is speculative on my part, since I have no personal experience with groups like this.)
A group of type #5 is really no cult at all (since there’s no leader), but a “mob” as you say. I was only calling it a “fractious cult” because the most common way to end up there is a large cult suddenly becoming much more egalitarian upon the loss of their leader. But I suppose it could also result from a guild growing too rapidly and carelessly. In any case, a mob is inherently unstable, and will quickly decay into something else.
In a perfect guild, every member carries around a mental model of every other member, which they consult whenever acting on behalf of the group. This can only work up to a size of 150, since it’s simply not possible to carry around more mental models than that (hence Dunbar’s Number). Therefore it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate broad sweeping authority to “standing committees” (etc.) that are less-than-perfectly accountable to the group, and have to use their own judgement in a lot of cases. Plenary meetings become increasingly rare and performative. In that respect it starts to take on certain culty characteristics, and so it’s an “imperfect guild”. On the other hand it’s not really a cult either; I don’t know where that boundary is. It may overlap with #8 somewhat.
The significance of the “phase boundaries” is that it takes a lot of “energy” to pass through them, and so groups will often break up or stagnate rather than do this. This is why the direction of the slope is meaningful. So e.g. when a growing clique approaches Robert’s Limit from the left, the more egalitarian-leaning members will believe it’s imperative to cross the boundary now (i.e. draw up a guild charter), whereas the more authoritarian-leaning members will think this is unnecessary. Therefore the group will either try to avoid exposing the division by ceasing to grow, or else break up, thus bouncing off the boundary.
Likewise, I imagine that when a growing guild approaches Dunbar’s Limit from the left, the authoritarian members will already be exceeding their mental-modeling-capacity and will thus think it’s necessary to cross the boundary (by appointing a standing committee or whatever), whereas the egalitarian members will insist on stretching their mental-modeling-capacity as far as possible in order to avoid compromising the “perfection” of the guild.
I wonder how often it would work better for guilds that grow too large to explicitly split apart. My intuition is that there should be a norm that growing guilds should split apart (and, where applicable, appoint representatives to a higher level org. to coordinate—initially a clique but later a guild if the number of base level guilds increases).
Splitting a guild in half may be difficult because some number of close 1:1 connections are going to be broken no matter where the line is drawn. Instead what may end up happening is that the guild undermines its own unifying principle and shatters into dozens of small cliques, and now there are 0 guilds.
The unfortunate reality (and what motivated me to write this post) is that sometimes an organization will find itself constrained by its past choices, with no viable way forward. A guild of 200 may wish it could’ve been two guilds of 100 instead, but the time to make that decision was when they were contemplating adding their 101st member, not now. (Similarly, a group of 60 may find itself in “embarrassed cult” territory and wish it could become a guild, but really they should’ve done that a long time ago.)
Maybe the ideal setup for a large community would be something like the “colleges within a university” system, where the university has a rule that each college may not grow beyond a certain size. So, as the existing colleges fill up, there will be a growing population of unaffiliated hangers-on who will eventually be able to form their own college.
(Again, I’m only speculating here since I have no personal experience with groups this large.)