I was discussing an interesting topic yesterday on individual productivity (and the inevitable decay thereof) in large orgs so I organized thoughts in a few paragraphs.

When you are a single person building something, the world is beautiful: no meetings, no planning, just doing whatever is the most pressing problem. You spend 100% of your time doing the most impactful thing you can.

When you are a small team of people building something, the world is still mostly beautiful: there are some meetings but you all know what’s the most pressing problem. The team still spends >90% of time doing impactful work as coordination tax is low.

Things get complicated as the team grows. You get more meta work: planning, retrospectives, backlog grooming, performance reviews, reorgs. There are different opinions on what’s most important. The team is now spending at most 60-70% of their time doing impactful work.

This is probably one of the reasons why organizations can’t grow indefinitely. Some orgs have been able to slow down the productivity decay by federating work into narrowly scoped independent teams: Google was good at this for a long time.

Fun fact: priority used to be a singular form only word until the 20th century. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/simpleliving/comments/4mdua4/until_the_1900s_the_word_priority_had_no_plural/

Having priorities (vs a single priority) is probably where things first start to fall off: they reduce focus, parallelize work, introduce dependencies. Then you start introducing process (say, SCRUM) to reduce chaos. That’s where the coordination tax burden starts biting, reducing individual productivity. Then we start hiring more people to compensate for the drop in overall productivity. More people start requiring more process to coordinate (=more tax), and the vicious cycle continues.

It’s obviously hard and sometimes impossible to resist the urge to do more things in parallel. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least try. Maybe we need an AA-like support group where we keep each other in check when feeling the need to start another workstream :-)