I think that they should be: for surely all else in Nature that is about relationships has math? Light, Gravity, Water and Heat etc. So why would there not be Math that supports how Human Relationships work?

I was re-reading my favourite text the other day – Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language – and I was stunned, but not surprised, to learn that not only do we humans have a gradient of Trust governed by math but that there are limits in the physical space as well beyond which, we fall out of community. Naturally these limits are hardly known, least of all by architects and maybe hardly at all by any of us who wish to design a physical space that promotes a healthy human community.

Alexander brings up this topic in the section on Small Public Squares (Pattern 61). He asks why so many public squares are dead space?

Here is the Space Magic Number #1 – 70.

• We cannot make out another face much over 70 feet away
• We cannot hear another person properly over 70 feet away

Any space that exceeds this – Piazza San Marco and Trafalgar are exceptions because they are a nexus in a large city and get filled to the right density – feels un social.

So here is Space Magic Number #2 – 300

• Any space with more than 300 square feet per person will feel “deserted”
• So a space with a diameter of 100 feet needs 33 people in it to feel ok
• So a space with a diameter of 35 feet needs only 4
• A space with 60 feet needs only 12
• It’s hard to get 33 or more people into a public space at any one time – it is much easier to get 4

I wonder – do these numbers then tie into what we know about group satisfaction – (Chris Allen)

My bet is that there must be a link between these two sets of numbers.

Forming the best groups in the best spaces will surely have an impact on the power of these groups. This then raises another question. Might getting the group size and the group space optimized have an impact on group power?

Do these numbers have any connection with Adoption?

Might knowing more about ideal groups and ideal spaces address the question that we all have – How can I optimize my power in the world?

Our model until now has been to use money as a substitute for social power.

Are we close now to seeing the Social Power Model? I think so.

In my follow up post to this, I will share a Fractal Model of how we have found social adoption to work in a university setting. If this is Fractal, then the social design we see in a University should match all fields of social groupings.

We may be getting close.

This is what the new organization looks like:

Here Valdis uses a real community – (OCL) – on the outside a loose group of “lurkers”. In the Green group – groups of loosely connected sub groups – In the Centre – the Core – a densely connected group that acts like a Sun. It has both mass that acts as a social gravity attracting inwards. It also acts as the sun in that this group also shines energy out that reaches to the far edges of the outer group.

Here is Valdis’ view of the core or as I call it the “Sun”.

Here is another view of what the “Sun” can do – it is an adoption force. Once the Sun is powerful enough, it can shift the paradigm. This may be how people get a disease like flu, adopt a new fashion. Or adopt social media and then a new view of how the world really works – that we are not part of a machine but part of an interconnected universe!

So the implications are clear for me anyway.

Adopting Social Media has nothing to do with the tools. After all the tools are cheap and easy to use. It is all about rewiring the habits and the mindset of people.

If you wish to have your organization adopt this new mindset and hence also its tool kit of social media. You are going to have to create a “Sun” – a densely connected but small group that are committed to the bigger idea that is the energy behind the Sun.

The numbers required for the core are modest. A core of 8 will get you an inner ring of 4,000. A core of 34 will get you an inner ring of 1,300,000. 89 will get you 62,000,000.

The leverage that is possible is incredible when compared to the traditional organization. This is where the costs fall away and the impact goes up.

I will talk more about this and offer you a number of real examples.

But here is the key insight. The Big idea cannot be about the internal needs of the organization. It can’t be about your sales, your profits etc. It cannot be about YOU. For the Sun to access the full energy of people and to spread out to the edge, it must be about US. It must be about the larger group that includes everyone who will be in the community.

More later.

Why is facetime and going to the “office” so important? Intellectually we know that most of what happens at the office is a huge waste of time – all those meetings – all that posturing! Why can’t we mainly work remotely?

Maybe it’s because we are in truth Primates and that what the office really presents is lots of opportunity for that central primate social lubricant – Grooming.

A recent study on grooming shows its economics: (CTV)

SINGAPORE — Male macaque monkeys pay for sex by grooming females, according to a recent study that suggests the primates may treat sex as a commodity.

“In primate societies, grooming is the underlying fabric of it all,” Dr. Michael Gumert, a primatologist at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said in a telephone interview Saturday.

“It’s a sign of friendship and family, and it’s also something that can be exchanged for sexual services,” Gumert said.

Gumert’s findings, reported in New Scientist last week, resulted from a 20-month observation of about 50 long-tailed macaques in a reserve in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia.

Gumert found after a male grooms a female, the likelihood that she will engage in sexual activity with the male was about three times more than if the grooming had not occurred.

And as with other commodities, the value of sex is affected by supply and demand factors: A male would spend more time grooming a female if there were fewer females in the vicinity.

“And when the female supply is higher, the male spends less time on grooming … The mating actually becomes cheaper depending on the market,” Gumert said.

Other experts not involved in the study welcomed Gumert’s research, saying it was a major effort in systematically studying the interaction of organisms in ways in which an exchange of commodities or services can be observed — a theory known as biological markets.

This is where I see tools such as Twitter playing such an important role in facilitating us leaving the office and working more from home. Twitter supports Grooming. I think that that is what Twitter is all about. Without this Grooming, we can’t increase the distance and hence cannot escape the office.

This then raises another aha for me. We have been here before.

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Robin Dunbar (Dunbar Numbers etc) has a theory (Grooming & Gossip & the Evolution of Language) about the evolution of language that enables us to see tools like Twitter in a new light.

In short it is this. Grooming is central to social cohesion in all primates – that includes us. Traditional Grooming is socially very expensive. You and I have to stop everything else and focus on each other. We have to be very close physically. Dunbar’s theory is that we started to use vocalizations to groom each other instead of touch. This enabled us to extend the distance and also freed up our hands to do other things such as get food.

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Earlier theories are based on the idea that language began as a response to complex hunting. But we all know that men don’t talk when hunting and wolves and lions who engage in complex hunting, don’t vocalize then either.

Intuitively Dunbar makes sense to me. So then Twitter might be a way of dramatically reducing the social costs of our essential need to Groom which now has to take place within the physical presence of our colleagues and our bosses.

Just as language broke the cost of touch, so Twittering can break the cost of going to the office.

Maybe, this simple little tool might be the most important breakthrough in how humans work and unleash the huge costs that we have embedded in having to go to the office to meet our primary social need as primates – Grooming!