Complexity of communication
Why people are organized in hierarchies. How more is never better.
This is the whole reason for us to have hierarchy and multiple teams in organizations. Let’s look at what this means.
If you are working with one more person, you have a direct line of communication with them. If you add one more person to the team, you have 3 lines of communication.
When you add one more person, it starts to get interesting. 4 people have 6 lines of communication. 5 people have 10 and so on. It grows very fast. 10 people have 45 lines and 12 people have 66!
Not just that, each line is a 2 way communication. So, you have 45 × 2 = 90 possible communication channels in just 10 people. Multiply that by every piece of information that needs to be shared & it gets totally crazy.
You can calculate this easily for any number (n) using the following formula:
Example: 10 multiplied by (10-1) = 90/2 = 45
Multiply by 2 for 2 way communication = 90
This is the whole reason, we have hierarchies. One person is directly in touch with only a few people. Those few people in turn will be in touch with a few more people of their own. This creates a hierarchy.
We have not found a better way yet.
Here’s are a few images to easily visualize the same:
The point of showing you this is to make you aware of the cosst of adding more people to a task. There’s an interesting law that if you add more poeple to a task mid way, it takes that much more time to complete, not less!
We all experience this, but this is the math behind organisations. Some food for thought :)