This article was taken from the April 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
In 1957, the British Naval historian and management satirist Northcote Parkinson painted a cynical picture of a typical committee: it starts with four or five members, quickly grows to nine or ten, and, once it balloons to 20 and beyond, meetings become an utter waste of time -- so all the important work is done before and after meetings by the five most influential members.
As Parkinson would have it, numerous studies now confirm that, when it comes to teams, many hands do not make light work. After devoting nearly 50 years to studying team performance, Harvard's J Richard Hackman concluded that four to six members is the best team size for most tasks, that no work team should have more than ten members, and that performance problems increase "exponentially as team size increases".
These troubles arise because large teams place often overwhelming "cognitive load" on members. Most of us are able to mesh our efforts and maintain good personal relationships with, say, three or four teammates. But as a group expands, each member devotes more time to co-ordination chores (and less time to actually doing the work), more handovers between members are required (creating opportunities for miscommunication and mistakes), and because each member must divide his or her attention among a longer list of colleagues, the team's social glue weakens (and destructive conflict soars).
Some organisations learn these lessons the hard way. The United States Marines began the second world war with combat units composed of 12 men, but soon switched to four men "fire teams" because a "12-man mob" was "immensely difficult" for squad leaders to control under the stress and confusion of battle, and close relationships -- where soldiers fight for their buddies -- were difficult to maintain. Similarly, the basic work unit at McKinsey, the consulting firm, is one "engagement manager" and three other members. As Intuit CEO Brad Smith puts it, when it comes to teams, "less is often best... Our development teams can be no larger than the number of people who can be fed by two pizzas," which helps them "stay nimble and make decisions quickly". This lesson applies to small organisations too. Pulse, a news-aggregator app, was started in mid-2010. Communication breakdowns and misunderstandings flared after it grew from three to eight people. Founders Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta discovered that, after they divided those eight among three teams, people produced better software, did it faster and argued less. Pulse continued to rely on small teams as it grew to 25 employees and 30 million users; it is now part of LinkedIn, which bought Pulse for $90 million (£54 million) in 2013.
In short, if you are on a big team that keeps screwing up, where members don't care much about each other and are fighting, try some subtraction or division. A Harvard Business School study by Melissa Valentine and Amy Edmondson of a large hospital's emergency department is instructive. The crowd of 30 or so doctors and nurses who staffed the department at any given time were divided into multiple six-person "pods", each led by a senior doctor or "attending physician". After the change, information about patients flowed more quickly and accurately and personal relationships improved markedly (nurses emphasised that doctors treated them with greater civility and respect). On top of that, Valentine and Edmondson's analysis of 160,000 visits revealed that the average patient waiting time dropped from eight hours to five hours -- without increased staffing levels.
Chris Fry, Twitter's head of engineering, observes that effective companies use hierarchies to find and remove bad bureaucracy -- especially elements that make people feel as if "they are walking in muck". Smart leaders know that oversized teams are among the most common culprits -- and are easier and cheaper to eliminate than most other sources of friction and failure.
Robert Sutton is a professor at Stanford University and co-author (with Huggy Rao) of Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More without Settling for Less (Random House).
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
