There’s a classic observation by Frederick Brooks in his Mythical Man Month—the name of the book has now come to stand-in for this idea—that the number of people on a team increases linearly, but the ways they need to communicate with each other follows an exponential curve. Essentially, adding more people to a team will result in the team moving even slower. And that was decades before Slack appeared, which may let you communicate with the whole group, but creates endless chatter and information sharing overkill slowing you down even more!
There’s a timeless truth here that is easy to forget: scaling working with other people slows things down by orders of magnitude. And a lot of the suggestions in this series, such as choosing over-communication as compared to under-communication, accentuate that pattern.
How do you keep it up, going at a reasonable speed? How do you limit the downside of the Mythical Man Month?
There are a few techniques that limit your exposure to this downside.
First, just keeping this on the top of your mind will make it easy for you to remember to avoid teams when not needed.
Second, apply this exponential pattern to meetings: every person added to a meeting makes the meeting go substantially slower, so keep as few people in each meeting as possible. As an easy way to remember why that has to be true, think about it this way: between two people, speaking alone, you can be honest and blunt easily. In a group of 110 people, you need to be political and careful and know that anything you say will be twisted out of context. Each one person added to that list is a leap from 1 to 110.
A point I glossed over in the last paragraph is important for emphasis. In any group of more than one person, it is easy for the others to discuss your words and your implications, as well as their feelings about you even when you’re not there. And they will. Not necessarily in a bad way, but you do it too, since you are human or mostly human (personally, I’m not fully human, I’m about 4% Neanderthal, according to 23andMe.)
A third tip to minimize the frustration of the Mythical Man Month is to try to reduce as much communication as possible to one-on-one, with aggressively shared meeting notes and TL; DRs of meetings. That way, you can both keep your focus on the productive one-on-one action, while keeping the rest of the team abreast of what is happening.
Re-reading my words above, it may not be clear why this is an important issue. Partially because the bureaucracies are built slowly, meeting by meeting. The downsides of bureaucracies are so manifest for those trying to achieve goals that there’s no need to articulate them here. But a broader reason is, to be an effective freelancer or consultant, no one wants someone else to just be caught up in paperwork, but to achieve results (and help define processes, as I’ve argued in an earlier chapter) so it’s always better to step away from meetings so you can be productive, rather than slowly turn yourself into yet another bureaucrat.
This is a serious challenge for working in any team that is not-tiny or fast-growing. But, as G.I. Joe observed, “knowing is half the battle.” Just being aware of this and its importance goes a long way.
