There are many proposed reasons for why teams above this range are less effective. The loafing effect first observed by Ringelmann, for example, seems to still play a role in knowledge work tasks. (Summarized simply: the more people working on a project, the easier it is to get away with putting in less effort.) But another key factor is the rising complexity of communication. It’s easy for six elephant hunters to coordinate their attack by just speaking up when they have something relevant to say. But if you increase this size to sixty, the effort would devolve into an incomprehensible scrum
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