Redundancy in small unit organization

[selil]

You might consider looking at one or two things (the discussion of MIS got my attention).

Is you military organization an industrial entity or a knowledge entity? I know you will come back and say it is both but here is the thing. An industrial organization/entity responds very well to limited span of control and hiearchical arrangements. A knowledge organization/entity can be much flattter and based on information and training you have the reasonable expectation that loosely coupled entities will make the right decisions on their own. Flexibility in the face of decimation due to illness/injury/strike rapidly reduces the capability of a industrial organization. Whereas a knowledge based ogranization has a flatter more robust response to injury. I don't know if that helps the discussion much but there it is...

[William F. Owen]

You might consider looking at one or two things (the discussion of MIS got my attention).

Is you military organization an industrial entity or a knowledge entity? I know you will come back and say it is both but here is the thing. An industrial organization/entity responds very well to limited span of control and hiearchical arrangements. A knowledge organization/entity can be much flattter and based on information and training you have the reasonable expectation that loosely coupled entities will make the right decisions on their own. Flexibility in the face of decimation due to illness/injury/strike rapidly reduces the capability of a industrial organization. Whereas a knowledge based ogranization has a flatter more robust response to injury. I don't know if that helps the discussion much but there it is...

That's very interesting. I have looked at some stuff about the best size for software development teams, which would seem to span both industry and knowledge. That suggested that team over 6-7 took longer to get things done, which gells with information flow and oversight associated with larger organisations.