Split Your Overwhelmed Teams

Re:Split Your Overwhelmed Teams by brightball on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @09:39AM (#33609650)

I saw a good chart that explains the issues as teams grow by showing the lines of communication between team members as the size of the team grows.

If you draw a dot for each member of a team and then a line from each dot to each other dot, you can see the "lines of communication".

With 3 members, there are 3 lines of communication (loc)

4 members, 6 loc

6 members, 15 loc

10 members, 45 loc

14 members, 91 loc

Communication breaks down as more people are involved.

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Re:Split Your Overwhelmed Teams by bombcar on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @12:09PM (#33611933)

This is the inverse of Metcalf's law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

As you get more and more lines of communication you end up having to break them and create a hierarchy.

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Re:Split Your Overwhelmed Teams by alexpetralia on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @12:34PM (#33612336)

Metcalfe's law succinctly explains why communication becomes more fraught as teams and organizations grow. Good managers minimize this quadratically rising cost.

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Re:Split Your Overwhelmed Teams by mateo411 on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @02:37PM (#33613900)

LOC = n(n - 1)/2

This is the same as the number of undirected edges in a N clique graph with no self edges.

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