We usually think of organisations as things designed around goals, authority, or culture. But there is a deeper and more fundamental reason why they exist.
Start with a simple network of people. With two people, interaction is straightforward. Add a third, and something changes: coalitions, mediation, and exclusion become possible. Add a fourth, and the situation becomes noticeably harder to follow. People are no longer responding just to those they speak with directly, but to what others are doing with each other. The network stops feeling like a set of links and starts to feel like an interaction field.
As group size increases, the number of interaction consequences grows much faster than the number of direct relationships. Each person must track exchanges, infer intentions, anticipate outcomes, and protect their own interests. Very quickly, this becomes cognitively demanding.
So people adapt.
They focus on some interactions and ignore others. They adopt roles. They rely on heuristics. They form coalitions. They withdraw from overload. And when many people do this at once, shared rules begin to appear: agendas, turn-taking, chairs, representatives, procedures, boundaries.
At that point, the group has become something new.
It has become an organisation.
From this perspective, committees, hierarchies, and procedures are not arbitrary inventions. They are practical solutions to a problem of interaction complexity. They help people manage the cognitive load of being in large groups. At the same time, they help ensure that useful exchanges happen reliably and disruptive ones are reduced; all in pursuit of a shared purpose.
In a new article, From Agent Networks to Organisational Architecture, I explore how interaction growth, cognitive limits, coping strategies, and shared purpose together explain why organisations can naturally emerge when groups of agents become large and interconnected.
You can read the full article here:
https://rational-understanding.com/sst
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