The crew of the Santa Fe, a nuclear submarine in the US Navy, had a crew complement of 135. That fits comfortably into the Dunbar theory of social capacity. One of the things that the captain changed, though, is moving the intimate technical knowledge down the organizational stack, placing decisions in the hands of those closest to the impacted domain space. Marquet realized rather profound improvements in organizational performance and engagement, but I’m not sure that he recognized that part of the reason for this success is restructuring responsibilities around smaller working groups that built deeper, more intimate relationships with their areas of responsibility (and removing himself from the decision space in the process).

Service Oriented Architecture vs. Dunbar’s Number