More often than any other factor, headcount growth kills companies.

The assumption of the status quo: Groups of people have advantage over individuals because they can do more work with better insights and fewer failures.

There are a ton of assumptions baked into this supposition.

• Everyone is working to a common goal.
• All individuals have input.
• Disagreements are raised and resolved to the benefit of the goal.
• Folks aren’t blocking each other’s work.

These assumptions ring less-and-less true as a group grows. We’re not wired to have the trust needed to fulfill them at scale. We can subscribe to a rule of law which forces them to be true, but we balk at those strictures—critique of Holacracy and Bridgewater’s Radical Transparency makes that abundantly clear.

Rather than trying to solve the problem, let’s dissolve it instead. Let’s not try to tightly align massive groups of people.

Option 1: Stay small.

If we can’t get the scaling we want out of a large group of people, what do we gain by having it? I’d argue, a headache.

Take a cold, hard think about what your needs are. Are you covering up problems with more bodies? Why are you doing the work you’re doing today? Can you drop some, most, or all of it?

Option 2: Allow a huge degree of autonomy around a vision.

Ok, you’ve got a big, nasty problem. It’s completely inconceivable that you’re get traction with a small group, cool.

Are you treating loosely coupled problems as a tightly coupled one? Could you design interfaces between your problems and let their insides be black boxes labled Magic ? There are certainly problems that can’t be solved this way, but I find that those are usually the ones which are sociological in nature. IE) Caused by overly large groups of people.

Option n: <Insert Option Here>

Obviously this isn’t an exhaustative list or a true dichotomy. I write down these two because they’re the path I rarely see travelled. Companies like Basecamp and Haier are showing how much can be done pursuing alternate strategies. I hope that we take their lessons to heart. Just because something is normal doesn’t mean it’s right. Solutions need to be fitted to their context. Design can dissolve problems or completely prevent their formation.

Everything is a trade-off because nothing stands in isolation. We need to acknowledge the rich, unpredictable ecosystems that are our socio-technical workplaces. Often that means giving up the illusion of control.