Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar developed a theory that the number of people humans can effectively have in their network is 150. He describes it as “the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar”.
Consider this excerpt from a recent BusinessWeek article on the topic:
“Dunbar actually describes a scale of numbers, delimiting ever-widening circles of connection. The innermost is a group of three to five, our very closest friends. Then there is a circle of 12 to 15, those whose death would be devastating to us. (This is also, Dunbar points out, the size of a jury.) Then comes 50, “the typical overnight camp size among traditional hunter-gatherers like the Australian Aboriginals or the San Bushmen of southern Africa,” Dunbar writes in his book How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Beyond 150 there are further rings: Fifteen hundred, for example, is the average tribe size in hunter-gatherer societies, the number of people who speak the same language or dialect. These numbers, which Dunbar has teased out of surveys and ethnographies, grow by a factor of roughly three. Why, he isn’t sure.”
How might this apply to social business usage and evolution? Perhaps the Dunbar size groupings can give us some insight into what value we can expect from social business networks.
| 3-5 innermost | Advice, guidance, highest trust, most honest feedback. Direct reports, supervisors. |
| 12-15 | Workgroup, team, shared objectives, shared processes, |
