When I began my career in Residence Life and Housing, I worked with hundreds of students on a daily basis. Between the approximately 1000 students I advised within the buildings I oversaw, and the several hundred I taught in various classes each year, I encountered quite a few names and faces. Trying to remember each of these names was a constant challenge, and I regularly recognized faces but struggled to pull up names to match. I learned how to cope by tailoring conversations in certain ways that would give me identity clues, and when that didn't work, "remind me of your name, again" seemed to do the trick. I'm guessing many of you have been in the same boat, either at work or in educational settings.
Maintaining connections with more and more people in our lives continues to be a greater challenge. Thousands of years ago, our social group was relatively small, we didn't travel much, and we mostly saw the same people on a regular basis. It was fairly easy to build community with them because we had repeated interactions. However, the industrial revolution forever reshaped our notions of community. All of a student, we found ourselves interacting with far more people than we ever had, albeit far less frequently than we were accustomed.
This has led to breakdowns in group cohesion. As organizations have grown larger and larger, they have struggled to maintain a positive, inviting, inclusive community. Entire industries have popped up to measure organizational climate and culture, and more importantly, help employees build better relationships with their colleagues. Unfortunately, we may be overestimating our ability to connect with others, and thus find ourselves setting unrealistic goals for company cohesion.
"Dunbar's number" is the idea that there is a cognitive limit on human groups of around 150 people. The idea being that in order to maintain group cohesion, each member needs to be able to meet their own needs, as well as coordinate their behavior with the others in the group. Individuals must also be able to address conflict within the group. Researchers commonly believe that the neocortex in the brain plays a significant role in controlling social relationships, so it's size could create an upper limit on the number of stable social relationships we can maintain.
If we accept this hypothesis as true, then it doesn't make much sense to be measuring overall culture in an organization with thousands of members. We should be far more concerned with climate and culture within smaller units and departments. If we assume that in most instances, we work most frequently and closely with those individuals within our immediate organizational vicinity, then those smaller units tell us much more about cohesion and inclusion than the organization as a whole.
We can begin asking more specific questions about sense of inclusion and belonging within individual units, as opposed to the organization as a whole. This can give us a much better understanding of what works and what doesn't, the areas of conflict that need to be addressed, and the best practices that should be encouraged. The larger organization may seem amorphous for many of us, but we are familiar with our own departments and the culture present within them. We look to strengthen those relationships, and ensure our needs are met within that particular space.
Perhaps we can spend less time trying to memorize the names of infrequent contacts, and more time building relationships with those we interact with most regularly. If I happen to ask you to remind me of your name, try not to hold it against me, eh? 🙂
