DailyKaizen

I just finished reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and was struck by the portion of the book dealing with manageable group size. The theory goes that our brain has a specific “channel capacity” and therefore an ability to comprehend and work with a certain size group. In studies, this is shown to correlate to neocortex size, with the idea being that a bigger neocortex came from a need to work and live with larger groups. The magic number is 150. Beyond that number of people, it is theorized that clans emerge and division occurs. People lose track of members of the group and relationships become fragmented. There is an article on this on the Web.

The company, Gore Associates, makers of Gore-Tex brand, are discussed as an example. It has deliberately capped the size of its plants at 150. Each parking lot has 150 spaces; when people start parking on the grass, a new plant is commissioned. As the story goes, employees within a plant have strong relationships with everyone else in the plant, across disciplines. Engineers know what marketing is doing, for example. An example was given of Lucent, which had a plant of 650 people. In that plant, there was less awareness across disciplines of people’s talents and skills.

This sounded like “cross functional” to me, and it made me think of our medical group, which is about 900 in number. Our competitive advantage is supported by the idea of a group practice. We have natural groupings by medical center of groups typically less than a hundred. What would it be like if there were groups of 150 tied together? Would these groups behave in a cross functional way that would support LEAN methodology in healthcare?

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