[yodon]

The article is talking about the numerical scaling laws that you understand intimately from your day job but that most people who don't think about node-based communication structures on a daily basis are surprised by. Specifically, the article is pointing out that the cognitive loading placed on managers grows much faster than linearly in the number of reports.

Have you thought about how to translate spine-leaf into an organizational design and/or what sort of organizations it might be optimal for?

[bluejekyll]

I'd like to think that modern network design actually could inform organizations, especially large ones, of better methods of communication.

The goal IMO is to increase collaboration between as many groups as possible. Where scrum teams, or similar, are autonomous in making decisions and the scrum masters (or managers) are responsible for inter-team communication and collaboration, but that shouldn't be the only channel. There should be other people from the scrum team responsible for interdisciplinary collaboration.

Basically, as an organization grows, I believe it becomes more important to have redundant communication channels into the scrum team. Like network design, this would be akin to have multiple uplinks from the ToR leading the the spine.