Melvin Conway once wrote, in what is now referred to as Conway’s law, the following:
Quote
[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. [1]
Conway’s law reminds me of Plato’s Republic in which Socrates describes the structure of a “just city” as a means of describing the qualities of a “just man” [2]. Loosely applying Conway’s law to Plato’s theory, we have:
Proposition 1
Cities are constrained to produce citizens which are copies of the structures of these cities.
In other words, the more just a city, the more just the citizens it can produce given citizens are copies of the city.
Could the opposite be true? Cities don’t simply produce citizens: humans create cities which produce citizens. But humans can do more than create cities. Conway would argue that humans make organizations. We can apply Conway’s law again to get:
Proposition 2
Humans are constrained to produce organizations which are copies of the [cognitive] structures of those humans.
If Proposition 2 is true, could it be that successful organizations, like Google and Microsoft, succeed because they are actually more accurate copies of the cognitive structures of humans? In that case, cognitive scientists might learn more about human cognition from studying the (more) transparent corporate organization of Google instead of the human mind.
References
[1] Conway, Melvin E. “How do Committees Invent?“. Datamation, 14(5):28–31, 1968.
[2] Bloom, Allan. The Republic of Plato. Translated, with notes and an interpretive essay. Basic Books, 1968.