When Bad Things Happen to Good Teams

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Teams are a vehicle for getting things done.  I love being a part of a team and am slowly learning how to lead effective teams.  One thing I’ve learned already is that the Team, as a vehicle, can sometimes get in the way.  In what follows, I’ll show how.

Quantifying Communication Breakdown

The size of a team has a direct relationship to level of effective communication — both miscommunication and lack of communication.  A more quantitative explanation is as follows:

One of the root causes of failure in projects is communication — either a lack thereof, or miscommunication.  Large teams are inherently vehicles for bad communication. This is basic combinatorics — for a given project, suppose there are persons A and B. In this scenario there is only 1 communication link. Add person C, now we have 3 communication links, A-B, B-C, C-A.  Add person D, then we have 6; Add person E, then we have 10 communication links. Inductively, as team size grows, the raw combinatoric communication link counts grows geometrically, not linearly. To demonstrate this, we use basic statistics of the form n-choose-r, where !, such as n!, is equivalent to n factorial, to arrive at the formula for how many pairs we can choose from n items:

For the number of pairs, we can reduce the above formula to the following:

Visually, as team size grows, the communication links grows non-linearly, but exponentially:

My True Position

Do not let the above dissuade you from large teams; if the product requires a large team, then that is what is needed.  Caution, is what I am arguing here. The facts are that the larger the team, the more communication channels there are and the entire process then becomes more error-prone.  If the product requires a large team, then expect the above challenge and manage it.

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