It is Brooks’s Law^⁠1 that states adding more people to a failing project to bring it back on track will only make things worse. It’s an idea that can sound a little counter-intuitive; you would assume, at first pass, that more people would do the work more quickly. Yet anyone who has worked in an organisation that has added a new management tier or expanded a team will instinctively know this. You add more people and things don’t magically get easier. You may sense the change intuitively, without ever quite being able to put your finger on why you’re feeling that way. But you felt the signs: perhaps things were destabilised, more difficult, less coordinated; perhaps you felt more work, or overwhelm, or confusion? 

Brooks suggests the benefits of additional team members are only realised in highly divisible tasks such as cleaning – or, in the terms of the Cynefin framework, in the best practice activities of the clear domain of ordered systems;. For most other scenarios the problem is compounded by the increased ‘ramp up’ (or onboarding) time for new staff and the additional communication burden. Let’s unpack this a little. 

First – and bear with me because this really is kind of cool – a little network theory. Imagine a family unit of two adults and two children. What are the total number of 1-1 conversations that can take place within this family unit? To avoid counting duplicate relationships, we see that the first person connects to the other three, the second to the remaining two, and the third to the fourth; a total of six 1-1 conversations. I use conversations here to illustrate the idea of connections in a network. A connection is a single relationship between two nodes in the network; in this example, each node, of course, represents a person. This relationship is represented as follows: 

I share this because not only is it a useful formula and relatively straightforward to apply (I say this as someone who gave up A-Level Maths), but also it enables us to make sense of some things in new ways. Think, for example, of the growth of a local voluntary sports club. Let’s say that three years ago it had 23 members but now it’s grown to 69, a three-fold increase. Perhaps, as a committee member, you now feel that you are having to deal with a load more issues and challenges, even if you can’t really find the evidence to make your case. But you would probably be right, and network theory has some explanatory power here.  

What’s really going on? We see that the membership has tripled by adding 46 new members. Let’s consider that every relationship between two members has the potential to be generally good, neutral or negative. Applying the formula will help us calculate the relational impact of the membership growth. This tells us that with 23 members (nodes) there are 253 connections, but at 69 members the number of connections reaches 2,346 – an increase of over 900%. So a 200% growth in membership translates to an increase in relationships between members of over 900%. Clearly the likelihood of arguments and disagreements and just general noise within the membership – the issues you need to handle, if you are on the committee – increases dramatically. This non-linear relationship is apparently – in one of the more evocative academic terms – known as a combinatorial explosion^⁠2. 

Imagine that your (sports, work, etc) team grows from six to thirty people, which I experienced when I merged a number of teams. The 1-1 relationships in that team’s network grow from 15 to 435. You probably feel that management burden. Sure, as manager you only have connections with the 29 other team members; it’s from the other 406 connections that issues and opportunities and can arise. 

Let’s assume we have an organisation with a CEO and 12 Heads of Service, giving a top management tier of 13 that is running the organisation. We calculate [(13*12)/2] that constitutes 78 relationships. Now, to reduce the line management burden on the CEO, a new Director tier of three new posts is introduced. What is the impact on the organisation? 

The new top management tier is now 4, which as we saw above, results in 6 relationships. The CEO sure feels the benefit, not only in their diary, as they now only have three direct reports rather than 12, but in the relationships in general, which have reduced by 72 (over 90%). As a strategic team it should be much easier to manage. 

The Heads, on the other hand, have moved from being part of a management team of 13, with the Chief Executive, to now being part of a group of 16 with the three new Directors. It may not seem like much but the total relationships at these tiers have increased by 42 (78 to 120), a 58% increase. While that’s only three more people to relate to, the organisational complexity within which they must work has significantly increased. I’ll explore this in more detail in the next article. 

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¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_explosion#Communication