Inertia, in general

I was just thinking about something which is probably obvious to physicists, but which applies to problems in other areas: inertia!

Inertia is the property of matter to continue doing what it's doing unless acted upon by an external force; a moving object will stay moving unless you stop it with an opposing force.

The amount of force that you need to stop it is proportional to the mass of the object; the more little bits that the object is made up of, the more energy it takes to change them all.

Groups of people behave in a similar way. The more people there are in a group, the more energy it will take to change their "direction" (and by direction, I mean what they're doing). The problem is that as a group gets larger, more total communication must take place to change the direction of every member. If you have a limited rate of communication, then it will take a long time for the group to change direction. However, with more powerful communication techniques, you could communicate faster, and thus reduce "turning lag".

Inertia seems to be the property that: as the number of individual components within a closed system increases, the more energy it will take to change the direction of the system as a whole.