Theory about worker productivity

an organization doing work is just an incredibly complex, dynamic, distributed, parallel process.

The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new members are added.

The ceaseless pursuit of force multipliers is the only possible route to superlinear productivity improvements as an organization grows.

Contention costs grow superlinearly as new members are added.

Staffing highly sequential efforts as if they were entirely parallel leads to catastrophe.

Coherence costs grow quadratically as new members are added. [...] The total time spent communicating will grow quadratically as the work capacity of the organization grows linearly.

Principles:

• Keep the work parallel, the groups small, and the resources local
• Prioritize the development of force multipliers
• If possible, factor work products into independent modules; if not, grow slowly and optimize.
• Scale organizational efforts across a portfolio of synergistic products
• Keep responsibility assignment matrices small, sparse, and local
• Prioritize asynchronous information distribution over synchronous
• Build humane organizations