Communication Thresholds

In Breakdowns in Communication, I talked about disfunction in an organization most often comes in the form of too much communication, not too little. With so much time spent on communication, other activities get crowded out and work output falls to zero.

It's incredible frustrating to be a part of this. Work stops being energizing and becomes a chore. All effort feels wasted. People often face burnout--not only because of the amount of work, but from the sheer pointlessness of it all.

Many people seem to have a this "startups good / corporations bad" take on business. I don't see it that way. Corporations are some of the most important, life-changing organizations that have ever existed. And if you compare their track record to other powerful organizations (governments and religions, mostly), they're doing a a pretty good job making lives better, not worse (despite obvious exceptions).

So why do people hate on (large) corporations so much?

The fundamental limit is that intimate communication takes a lot of time. In order to succeed, large companies are forced to replace intimate communication with efficient communication. Yet, intimate communication is required to build the relationships that become the basis for future (more nuanced) information transfer. Intimate communication also feels more natural, more rewarding, and generally more human. Replacing it (poorly) leaves a lot of people alienated from their work. This simply doesn't feel good.

Just because the company is large doesn't mean it has to be soulless, but the problem is really hard to solve well. Let's explore why.

First, let's recognize that intimate, two-way communication blocks all other activity. You can't be working a spreadsheet or a piece of code while sitting in a 1-on-1 meeting and making the other person feel heard. Attention is the critical thing that determines your bandwidth.

If your workweek is 40 hours long, you only have 80 slots. That's your total attention-limited capacity. So at the very most, you only have time for 80 highly intimate 30-minute conversations per week--and that's if you do literally nothing else: no emails, no reading, no group meetings, no actual individual contributor work.

A little bit of combinatorial math (not much!) illustrates how that limited capacity gets eaten up as teams scale.

If you have two people in on your team, there is exactly one pair--meaning only one possible combination for a conversation:

If you add a third, you get 3 possible combinations:

If you add a fourth, you get six total possible combinations:

At this point, things start to really get away from you. By the time you're at 10 team-members, there are 45 possible combinations!

By the time there are 13 people in the group, there are 78 possible pairs--meaning that if all communication was handled solely through 1-on-1 30-minute meetings, everyone in the organization would be spending their entire 40-hour workweek just having coffee with someone else.

Of course, not everyone talks to everyone else, some communication happens in larger (but still pretty intimate) groups, and some conversations can happen on a less frequent basis. But all of that is offset by the need to have heads down time and do actual work. In practice, small teams hit a threshold around 8-10 people where the instinctual form of a few group meetings + many intimate 1-on-1's breaks down.

This is why the intimate atmosphere is so easy to maintain in small teams and so hard to do in large teams--the number of intimate bonds to maintain explodes to the point where something else is needed to coordinate all these people.

I have personally experienced additional thresholds around 20-30 people and 80-100 people. In general, 50 seems to be a great size for a cross-functional business unit. It's large enough that many different roles can be represented, and small enough that cross-functional, intimate relationships can be maintained (though not with everyone--but its enough).

As organizations scale, there are three primary tactics for replacing constant, intimate communication with more efficient communication:

1. Evolving the form and frequency of communication
2. Increased reliance on "hubs"
3. Relationship-building as its own (often forced) exercise

The easiest thing to do is just change the form and frequency of comms.

For example:

• Instead of in-person status update meetings for a subset of the group, switch to email/slack updates that go out to all relevant stakeholders
• Instead of using 1-on-1's for certain discussions, move to standups or business reviews that let everyone get the information at once
• Move to a project management tool that allows anyone to look at the status of work in real time
• Reduce the frequency of meetings/updates where possible

However, all the intimate two-way communication afforded by the meetings disappears. In addition, the frequency slows and the fidelity of the information degrades.

What do I mean by fidelity? When you're checking in, in person, multiple times a week (or even multiple times a day), you get lots of detail in the communication--detail that gets lost as you move to less frequent, less intimate communication styles.

To offset this, teams have to trust each other more. They have to trust that other person will get the job done, ask for help when needed, and communicate what is necessary (neither leaving out important information nor bogging everyone down with details that don't matter to other team members).

Yet, the same steps that force the need for more trust among the team actually make it harder to create that trust. So while evolving your communications helps the immediate problem, it then spawns a new problem: how do you replace the good stuff that came with the intimacy that was lost?

Let's switch contexts a little bit and imagine we have two teams, of five people each, who all need to keep up to date on what the other team is doing. This could be a frontline customer support team and a tech support team, a product and engineering team, whatever.

The naive map of communication would look something like this:

Pretty! But also a total disaster from an organizational standpoint. We would never want to run our teams like this, as its just not possible to scale. People would either never get anything done, or they'd be closing themselves off to important information in order to get more individual work time.

To improve on it, we can introduce a single role: the hub. Everyone communicates with the hub, and then the hub ensures all the relevant information is pushed to each person.

The new communication map looks like this:

The first versions of these hubs are managers. In small teams, while the hub plays an a critical role, there's just not enough work for the hub to be a totally separate role. Since anyone in a management/leadership role naturally needs to be up to date on everything that the team is doing, it makes sense for them to hold down this role too.

However, with all the demands of being a management/leadership role, they will quickly become the bottleneck. If the entire team is waiting on the limited, hard-to-schedule time of their managers, then not a lot is going to get done. Once this pain starts to be felt in earnest, the hub role gets broken out into a separate function--who now also needs to keep the manager/leader up to date as well.

The titles for the hub-specific role are usually something like project manager, producer, coordinator, etc. Some teams try to mix the hub role into other roles that seem like natural fits (like product management), but in my experience, if you need a hub, you need someone who's focus is being the hub.

When things are going well, it might feel like overkill--but that's not the right testing ground. It's when things are going wrong that the hub really shines. When things go wrong, the hub shines by freeing up everyone to do their individual work (identifying the root cause, talking to angry customers, fixing the code) while still ensuring the team is moving in sync.

Of course, this does impact the intimacy of the bonds across the teams. The original set up was inefficient but gave each person the best chance at forming deep bonds with people from the other team.

The hub-based setup is far more efficient, but the two teams will feel isolated from each other. There's no opportunity for cross-team interaction, so we lose all basis for trust except for shared trust in the hub. The hub then becomes a key role for just holding the company together--and innovations that require cross-team coordination often suffer.

Thus the hubs--once again--introduce new problems in solving the old ones. How do we foster intimacy across teams when everyone's only talking to their hubs?

The obvious answer is to set aside time for it. However, this is like being forced to sit at the same table with your cousins, whom you see once every few years, just because you're kind of the same age. Maybe you hit it off. Maybe it's miserable.

The fact that the relationship building is intentional doesn't have to make it suck--but there are particular issues in this setting. People who come together to work on problems develop a specific kind of trust, over time. You can't replace it with a 2-day bender. Even if you're not just partying, artificial exercises can work or backfire.

At Extra, we're remote first, so the problem can be much worse, but the remote-first culture also make in-person meet ups a clear sign. This is different. Pay attention. We do two in-person all-company retreats a year, plus working on team-specific in-person meet ups.

I may discuss good/bad version of intentional relationship building, but for now I'll just leave it as: the intentional part can be great at driving efficiency and equally powerful at stripping away any sense of authenticity. It's hard to get right.

It's also a new challenge to manage Communications Channels in a Remote Work Setting.