A committee only gets smarter with size if its members beat a coin toss
Condorcet's jury theorem shows that if the average member of a group votes more accurately than chance, adding members raises the odds the majority is right. The catch cuts both ways: if the typical member does worse than a dice roll, every extra seat makes the committee's decisions worse.
The word organisation reaches English through French and medieval Latin from the Greek organon, which meant a tool, a musical instrument or a bodily organ. An organisation is any entity of one or more people with a purpose, whether a company, an institution or a club. Some operate secretly or illegally, like criminal networks or resistance movements. The political scientist Jack Knight treats organisations as a narrower version of institutions, distinct because they contain their own internal rules governing members.
Legal forms are many: corporations, governments, charities, cooperatives, partnerships, armed forces, religious bodies, schools and international organisations. Hybrid organisations straddle public duties and commercial markets at once. Voluntary associations run by volunteers can, depending on the jurisdiction, exist without any legal formalities, expressing their purpose in a manifesto or simply through what they do. Recognition may come through incorporation, public pressure, or being accepted as a group's negotiating voice.
Management science sorts most organisations into a few broad structures. In committees and juries, peers decide together, often by voting; the difference is that committee members usually carry out the decision afterward while jurors simply deliver one. Medieval continental juries even determined the law by consensus among local notables. Parliamentary procedure such as Robert's Rules of Order exists to stop committees from talking endlessly without deciding.
Other designs trade stability for competition. In the so-called ecology model, units that perform well get more work while inefficient ones starve, and everyone effectively runs a small business that must show a profit. GlaxoSmithKline has described operating this way, though critics note the model misreads nature, where ecoregions rarely compete. A matrix organisation instead gives each worker two bosses: a functional expert who maintains skills and an executive manager focused on finishing projects by product, region or customer.
Source: Organization
