I’ll give general takes in another comment, but I just wanted to call out how I think that at least for some of your examples the assumptions are unrealistic (and this can make the puzzle sound worse than it is).
Take the case of “The funding of an organization and the people working at the org”. In this case the must factors combine in a sub-multiplicative way rather than a multiplicative way. For it’s clear that if you double the funding and double the people working at the org you should approximately double the output (rather than quadruple it). I think that Cobb-Douglas production functions are often a useful modelling tool here.
In the case of managers or the Forum I suspect that it’s also not quite multiplicative—but a bit closer to it. In any case I do think that after accounting for this there’s still a puzzle about how to evaluate it.
I’ll give general takes in another comment, but I just wanted to call out how I think that at least for some of your examples the assumptions are unrealistic (and this can make the puzzle sound worse than it is).
Take the case of “The funding of an organization and the people working at the org”. In this case the must factors combine in a sub-multiplicative way rather than a multiplicative way. For it’s clear that if you double the funding and double the people working at the org you should approximately double the output (rather than quadruple it). I think that Cobb-Douglas production functions are often a useful modelling tool here.
In the case of managers or the Forum I suspect that it’s also not quite multiplicative—but a bit closer to it. In any case I do think that after accounting for this there’s still a puzzle about how to evaluate it.