Member-only story
Zooming Out: The First Challenge of a Growing Team
I would find it funny if it didn’t keep biting me in the ass.
As a group of people grows, it invariably runs into the problem where the amount of stuff going on surpasses any one person’s ability to keep up with it all. That group size limit varies of course depending on how much is going on, how many of those things are outside of someone’s expertise, and the capabilities of the person trying to grasp it all — but is near 10 for most people.
At that point, people are faced with three options. The first is simply to try harder. You’ll see this in inexperienced founders and folks with certain compulsions. They need to know everything is going on and will prioritize that over pretty much anything else. Work gets deprioritized, home life gets deprioritized, and soon they find themselves spending almost all of their day rushing about just to satisfy that need to know all of the things. We’re going to ignore this quick and easy recipe for burnout.
The other two options are two sides of a coin. In order to scale, people need to reduce the amount of incoming information. One approach, which we’ll call fuzzy reality turns down the fidelity of that information. You still learn about all of the things going on, but not with the depth or precision that you could have when the group was small. The second approach turns the nob in the other direction. The clear approximation approach leaves the fidelity high, but reduces the amount of incoming information by limiting the things you follow.
At first glance, these approaches seem similar. They’re both removed from high granularity reality. They both scale enough to get a so-so understanding of what large groups of people are doing. They both seem a little dangerous to depend on alone.
What keeps biting me in the ass is that executives (and really, most humans) love clear approximations. They provide certainty. You might not know everything, but damnit, you are going to have a firm grasp on the stuff you do know. You see it with OKRs. You see it with KPIs. You see it with quarterly goals and executive dashboards and employee pulse surveys and sprint velocity and NPS. They all provide very a objective, numerical, clear view into what is going on.
