Community and rule of 150

I'm finally reading through "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell about how little things can make a big difference. I just finished his chapter about the rule of 150, and it finally explained something that I've been hearing at JBU for years about the supposed loss of community and why that may have happened.

Most have said that the fundamental change is just one of size. But what is it about size that matters, and when does that size problem become significant? Gladwell argues (with lots of evidence) that our brains are wired to handle no more than about 150 relationships at a time. Any group that gets larger than that "tips" into needing a whole host of bureaucratic and heirarchical structures in order to accomplish things instead of being able to rely on informal conversations and personal relationships. The Gore company (of Gore-tex fame) doesn't allow any of their plants to get larger than 150 employees, for example, and they don't have any heirarchy (everyone is an "associate"), budgets, strategic planning processes, salary scale, employee handbook, etc. As long as they spin off each a subset of a plant as soon as a group gets near 150, the system works (and apparently works incredibly well). Hutterites use the same organizing principle.

So, to return to the JBU situation, when did we start hearing laments about the loss of community at JBU? From those I talked to, it's when we were about half the size we are now, i.e. roughly at 150-200 employees. Coincidence? I think not. And that means that we'll never be able to restore the campus-wide sense of community we used to have. The best we can hope to do is follow the "small group" model of having a series of smaller semi-autonomous groups that we manage simultaneously, which is, by default, what I think we're increasingly doing.