The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

by Malcolm Gladwell

military planners have arrived at a rule of thumb which dictates that functional fighting units cannot be substantially larger than 200 men,” Dunbar writes. “This, I suspect, is not simply a matter of how the generals in the rear exercise control and coordination, because companies have remained obdurately stuck at this size despite all the advances in communications technology since the first world war. Rather, it is as though the planners have discovered, by trial and error over the centuries, that it is hard to get more than this number of men sufficiently familiar with each other so that they can work together as a functional unit.” It is still possible, of course, to run an army with larger groups. But at a bigger size you have to impose complicated hierarchies and rules and regulations and formal measures to try to command loyalty and cohesion. But below 150, Dunbar argues, it is possible to achieve these same goals informally: “At this size, orders can be implemented and unruly behavior controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts. With larger groups, this becomes impossible.”

FAST Agile - Dunbar's number for tribe size

The Hutterites (who came out of the same tradition as the Amish and the Mennonites) have a strict policy that every time a colony approaches 150, they split it in two and start a new one. “Keeping things under 150 just seems to be the best and most efficient way to manage a group of people,” Bill Gross, one of the leaders of a Hutterite colony outside Spokane told me. “When things get larger than that, people become strangers to one another.”

FAST Agile - Dunbar's number for tribe size

a number of relatively minor changes in our external environment can have a dramatic effect on how we behave and who we are.

Lewin's equation

If we want groups to serve as incubators for contagious messages, then, as they did in the case of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood or the early Methodist church, we have to keep groups below the 150 Tipping Point. Above that point, there begin to be structural impediments to the ability of the group to agree and act with one voice.

FAST Agile - Dunbar's number for tribe size

The Rule of 150 says that congregants of a rapidly expanding church, or the members of a social club, or anyone in a group activity banking on the epidemic spread of shared ideals needs to be particularly cognizant of the perils of bigness. Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference.

FAST Agile - Dunbar's number for tribe size

Perhaps the best example of an organization that has successfully navigated this problem is Gore Associates, a privately held, multimillion-dollar high-tech firm based in Newark, Delaware.

At Gore there are no titles. If you ask people who work there for their card, it will just say their name and underneath it the word “Associate,” regardless of how much money they make or how much responsibility they have or how long they have been at the company. People don’t have bosses, they have sponsors—mentors—who watch out for their interests. There are no organization charts, no budgets, no elaborate strategic plans. Salaries are determined collectively. Headquarters for the company is a low-slung, unpretentious red brick building. The “executive” offices are small, plainly furnished rooms, along a narrow corridor. The corners of Gore buildings tend to be conference rooms or free space, so that no one can be said to have a more prestigious office.

Gore has managed to create a small-company ethos so infectious and sticky that it has survived their growth into a billion-dollar company with thousands of employees. And how did they do that? By (among other things) adhering to the Rule of 150. Wilbert “Bill” Gore—the late founder of the company—was no more influenced, of course, by the ideas of Robin Dunbar than the Hutterites were. Like them, he seems to have stumbled on the principle by trial and error. “We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty,” he told an interviewer some years ago, so 150 employees per plant became the company goal. In the electronics division of the company, that means that no plant was built larger than 50,000 square feet, since there was almost no way to put many more than 150 people in a building that size. “People used to ask me, how do you do your long-term planning,” Hen said. “And I’d say, that’s easy, we put a hundred and fifty parking spaces in the lot, and when people start parking on the grass, we know it’s time to build a new plant.” That new plant doesn’t have to be far away. In Gore’s home state of Delaware, for instance, the company has three plants within sight of each other.

FAST Agile - Dunbar's number for tribe size

It’s not hard to see the connection between this kind of organizational structure and the unusual, free-form management style of Gore. The kind of bond that Dunbar describes in small groups is essentially a kind of peer pressure: it’s knowing people well enough that what they think of you matters. He said, remember, that the company is the basic unit of military organization because, in a group under 150, “orders can be implemented and unruly behavior controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts.” That’s what Bill Gross was saying about his Hutterite community as well.

FAST Agile - Dunbar's number for tribe size

The fissures they see in Hutterite colonies that grow too big are the fissures that result when the bonds among some commune members begin to weaken. Gore doesn’t need formal management structures in its small plants—it doesn’t need the usual layers of middle and upper management—because in groups that small, informal personal relationships are more effective. “The pressure that comes to bear if we are not efficient at a plant, if we are not creating good earnings for the company, the peer pressure is unbelievable,” Jim Buckley, a longtime associate of the firm, told me. “This is what you get when you have small teams, where everybody knows everybody. Peer pressure is much more powerful than a concept of a boss. Many, many times more powerful. People want to live up to what is expected of them.”

What Buckley is referring to here is the benefit of unity, of having everyone in a complex enterprise share a common relationship.

memory. Here, for example, is how one Gore associate describes the kind of “knowing” that emerges in a small plant: “It’s not just do you know somebody. It’s do you really know them well enough that you know their skills and abilities and passions. That’s what you like, what you do, what you want to do, what you are truly good at. Not, are you a nice person.”

FAST Agile Tribe

What Gore has created, in short, is an organized mechanism that makes it far easier for new ideas and information moving around the organization to tip—to go from one person or one part of the group to the entire group all at once. That’s the advantage of adhering to the Rule of 150. You can exploit the bonds of memory and peer pressure.

FAST Agile - Dunbar's number for tribe size

Gore had to break itself up into semi-autonomous small pieces. That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.

“At the same time, minorities received the highest level of positive attention and had the greatest influence on the private opinions of members in the majority and on the final group decision when they communicated face to face.”

Face to face communication