Jeff Bezos has the "two pizza rule," meaning that any team should be able to be fed by just two pizzas; if not, then the team is too large. We are seeing a big shift away from large structured centrally located teams to smaller more globally distributed teams which are held together by technology. As long as team members can access to the internet it doesn't matter where they are located.

I may sound like a broken record when I say this, but the future of work is absolutely about breaking down barriers between teams and geographies. Sales should be speaking with product development, marketing should be speaking with customer service and support and engineering should be speaking solution delivery teams. The traditional model saw only people in the same team or physical location share and collaborate; no more. The organization of the future is a connected organization where information, collaboration and communication happens without boundaries.

There's a reason why large organizations are stereotyped as being slow-moving, bureaucratic, old-fashioned and simply outdated...because many of them are. Larger organizations are at a high risk for being disrupted (just take a look at what's happening with IBM) which means they need to learn how to operate like smaller companies. However, a paradox exists. As organizations grow so does their complexity which results in more sluggishness. However, these same organizations also want more profits which means they have to grow. So, they are stuck with trying to find a way to grow while becoming less complex. I talk about this much more in my book including exploring a few possible scenarios.

Often relegated to the methods section of genetic research articles, the term “degeneracy” is regularly misunderstood and its theoretical significance widely understated. Degeneracy describes the ability of different structures to be conditionally interchangeable in their contribution to system functions. Frequently mislabeled redundancy, degeneracy refers to structural variation whereas redundancy refers to structural duplication. Sources of degeneracy include, but are not limited to, (1) duplicate structures that differentiate yet remain isofunctional, (2) unrelated isofunctional structures that are dispersed endogenously or exogenously, (3) variable arrangements of interacting structures that achieve the same output through multiple pathways, and (4) parcellation of a structure into subunits that can still variably perform the same initial function. The ability to perform the same function by drawing upon an array of dissimilar structures contributes advantageously to the integrity of a system. Drawing attention to the heterogeneous construction of living systems by highlighting the concept of degeneracy valuably enhances the ways scientists think about self-organization, robustness, and complexity. Labels in science, however, can sometimes be misleading. In scientific nomenclature, the word “degeneracy” has calamitous proximity to the word “degeneration” used by pathologists and the shunned theory of degeneration once promoted by eugenicists. This article disentangles the concept of degeneracy from its close etymological siblings and offers a brief overview of the historical and contemporary understandings of degeneracy in science. Distinguishing the importance of degeneracy will hopefully allow systems theorists to more strategically operationally conceptualize the distributed intersecting networks that comprise complex living systems.

Degeneracy: Demystifying and destigmatizing a core concept in systems biology
Paul H. Mason

Complexity
Volume 20, Issue 3, pages 12–21, January/February 2015

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cplx.21534 ;