Less is more, even when we communicate

Lifehacker picks this little tid-bit of insight from Inc:

You might think that involving a bunch of people in every company meeting and email keeps everyone on the same page. In reality, it's a productivity killer that hinders rather than helps employees get their work done via For Better Productivity, Try Communicating Less – Work – Lifehacker.

The cost of overcommunication within organizations was fleshed out by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month. Brooks helped run the OS/360 project at IBM, building a giant operating system for the company’s mainframes. In those days, computers were large, room-size, water-cooled machines, sometimes with a massive 256,000 bytes of main memory. OS/360 was probably the largest software project ever attempted to that point. And it was monumentally late.

Every time some aspect of the project fell behind schedule, IBM assigned a few more people to the task. And what Brooks noticed, which still surprises people, is that this didn’t work. His observation came to be known as Brooks’ Law: Adding people to a late project tends to make it run later still.

Read that sentence again, because it’s not intuitive. Brooks discovered that adding people to a project will put it further behind schedule.

How can that be? Well, when you add a new person to a team, that person needs to communicate and coordinate with all the other people on the team. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is. The new kid doesn’t know what’s going on, so somebody else on the team — somebody who just last week was doing productive work — has to stop his or her work and show this newbie the ropes via INC

The news is significant because it also contradicts most of crowdsourcing mythology. If crowdsourcing were real it would die under the weight of its communication burden. Most spontaneous group project are highly organized and quite hierarchical. The crowds work, while just a few communicate, usually from the top down.  How else do you explain the fact that Wikipedia has 11 million registered users and a couple thousand admins/bureaucrats/check-users and, of course, one Sun King?

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