Atomic teams of Three
Today's article is about some everyday magic that usually goes unnoticed in teams of 3.
The magic number is 3
As companies grapple with the looming recession, there's a shift towards small teams delivering more. The question is how?
At The Zig, we're accustomed to working in small teams, not because of some great wisdom on my part but more to do with resource constraints.
As a startup, there really isn't an option to just hire another person or outsource, so you buckle up and get the work done despite the limitations. One observation I've made operating in this mindset is that more often than not, given clarity of purpose, support when needed, and an abundance of autonomy, the principle of self-governing teams works exceptionally well in clusters of 3 people. I'm not sure why, but here are my three theories on this:
The sense of ownership and size of responsibility causes people to rise to the occasion inherently.
Dividing engineering work among three people typically allows for simple division of labor e.g., front-end, back-end, and data. (An oversimplification, but you get the idea)
Here's the big one: Communication and coordination amongst three people is optimal because there are only six total permutations of communication flow. Add one more person to the team, and the total becomes 24! An increase of 4x with just one additional team member. Three is the sweet spot.
Here's The Math:
Permutations = 3! = 3 x 2 x 1 = 6
Permutations = 4! = 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24Look how bad it gets with teams of five!
Permutations = 5! = 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 120
This is clearly an exaggeration because we've obviously optimized communications to be better than playing bidirectional telephone, but you get the idea.
There's a trade-off between individual productivity and team productivity as a team scales, finding ways to counterbalance that feels intuitively like the right thing to do. I hope to figure this out and distill it into an actionable way of optimally structuring teams.
Still, by sheer accident, our teams deliver surprisingly large projects in astonishingly small windows of time with three or fewer people. There's magic in teams of three. So, as you consider ways to do more with less, try breaking up your teams into groups of three. See what magic happens in your org.