On Monday was the Transport Group meeting. I brought the Mad Scientist along, and as usual, he just used up all the available time to talk about everything under the sun. Interesting stuff, but I've heard it all before: the patent for a windmill he's doing that will never be finished, his belief that catastrophic climate change is just round the corner, his name-dropping of the local MP and other politicians, and a good assortment of news on energy technologies and climate change. It doesn't normally bother me too much that I barely manage to get a word in edgeways from time to time (I'm not a big talker), but what bothered me was that everybody were lapping it all up with a glow of warm respect, when in fact, I know my stuff much better than the Mad Scientist ever will, and I get a lot less respect and attention.
On Thursday I met with the Buddhist Engineer and the Photocopies Businessman (a newcomer) to talk about the workshop I'm thinking of doing on systems, structures, and how it relates to organizing. I've been studying the subject and there is fascinating stuff there.
For example, magic numbers: the ideal number for a team is 7 plus/minus 2. For bigger groups, a good size is between 25 and 80, ideally 50. Notice that 25 is 5*5, 49 is 7*7 and 81 is 9*9. Then there's Dunbar's number, which is the maximum number of people a person can comfortable relate to, usually quoted as 150, but other studies put as high as 230. If you make it 200, to get a nice round number, you get some interesting figures: 200*200=4,000 is the size of a market town, which is what Rob Hopkins always says is a good size for a Transition initiative. When you think about it, 200 is the top size a group can be and still be organized by informal means, and by the time the group reaches that size, you can assume that just about everyone in the town knows somebody involved in the group, and you've reached a tipping point of influence without ever having to figure out anything more complicated than informal organization. 200*200*200=8,000,000 is the size of a small country. Interestingly, representative democracy seemed to work quite well when it was invented (and countries had lower populations) and in small countries, not so well in bigger countries. A parliament has roughly 200 people in it, and each member of parliament has a constituency of about 4,000 people in a small country. Within those 4,000, perhaps about 200 are active politically to such a degree that they get to talk with their local MP. In sum, everybody knows somebody who can get to the ear of the local MP. Finally, 200*200*200*200 is 1,600,000,000 which is roughly the size of the Catholic church. Interestingly, the Catholic church manages to operate essentially with only five levels of hierarchy: Pope, cardinal, bishop, priest, people. This suggest that the Catholic church is about as big as it could get without adding any more levels of hierarchy... but of course, the more levels, the more distant people feel from the top.
Anyway, I didn't get to say any of this stuff or other things I've found about, because the Photocopies Businessman was taking all the airspace. Interesting guy, has lots of useful contacts, but definitely was the wrong person to meet in this case. And the irony of it is that I'm trying to do this workshop mostly to get some airspace myself, because I'm so tired of all my organizational comments to fall on deaf ears, since the beginning of getting involved in Transition.
Well, who knows... maybe people will start listening when it hits them that I have useful things to say.
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