To understand why, in a corporate context, more is often worse, we have to look at the work of one of my favourite authors: Nassim Taleb.

Taleb gave us the concept of Antifragility.

Most things are Fragile (they break under stress, like a glass vase). Some are Robust (they resist stress, like a concrete pillar). But a rare few are Antifragile, and actually get stronger when you kick them.

Think of your immune system, which needs bacteria to learn how to fight, or a muscle that only grows by being torn in the gym.

In a perfect world, a corporate transformation project would be antifragile. For example, a missed deadline would be a stressor that forces the team to find a radical new efficiency.

Usually, though, the opposite happens.

Most complex corporate work is not just fragile but Antiscalable.

In a scalable world, if one person can bake one cake in an hour, two people can bake two.

But in the reality of corporate, we live under Brooks’ Law:

Adding manpower to a late project makes it later.

When you hit the antiscalable wall, the solution is to cut the lines.

Don't hire a new fleet, but rather identify a small, "fragile" group of people who are given the autonomy to ignore the bureaucracy and just do the f*cking job!