past 30-60 employees, companies enter the theatre stage. 

discussions become less outcome driven and more focused on putting on a performance for the others in the room.

the performances don't just suck up energy from productivity, but also saturate every decision making process with noise.

do you think larger organizations can avoid this by clearly separating responsibilities into smaller groups? Like a microservices architecture approach to org structure

The Optimism Collective is broken into different entities with different focuses and they each excel in their individual domains. The challenge is the cross functional coordination. You want to avoid siloing to maintain meaningful collaboration.

I’ve seen instances of being able to cut through the noise when there are clearly defined interfaces and an entity playing the facilitator role. 

However human coordination is a difficult task in general. So for larger coordination efforts striking up a balance between structure and flexibility is key.

that's interesting. have you seen some examples? 

I've seen relative success in "startup within a startup" models. give autonomy to a group led by someone you trust and then roast them privately in small meetings. 

"cross-functional" meetings are more theatre like.