Communication Overhead
Keep teams small enough that coordination does not consume the work
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 97%
Communication overhead is the rising share of time and energy spent sharing information as the number of people involved in daily work increases. Each added participant can increase capacity, but also introduces more relationships to coordinate. At sufficient scale, alignment, stakeholder conversations, and meetings displace the value creation, marketing, sales, delivery, or finance work the team exists to perform. Kaufman illustrates the cost with a P&G project in which he spent three months aligning 30 or 40 stakeholders before a pilot proposal could be produced. His practical boundary is a dedicated team of roughly eight people: additional members can still add capacity, but the group remains small enough to work rather than coordinate continuously. Amazon's two-pizza-team rule offers a visual proxy for the same constraint.
Origin
Kaufman presents communication overhead in the people section of The Personal MBA and grounds it in his seven years at Procter & Gamble.
Core principles
- 01Every additional relationship creates coordination work
- 02Communication can displace value-producing activity
- 03Small dedicated teams add capacity without excessive overhead
- 04Team boundaries should preserve focus
How to run it
- 1
Map daily coordination
List everyone a person must communicate with routinely to complete the work.
Pro tip Count stakeholders as well as formal team members.
- 2
Measure the displacement
Estimate how much time goes to alignment and information sharing instead of the team's primary output.
Pro tip Review calendars after a project, as Kaufman did, rather than relying on impressions.
Watch out Busy communication can look productive while delaying the actual work.
- 3
Set a small-team boundary
Keep a team dedicated to one outcome small enough that members can coordinate directly.
Pro tip Use about eight people or the two-pizza test as a practical signal, not a precise law.
- 4
Split and refocus
When coordination dominates, divide the group into smaller teams with clear responsibilities.
Pro tip Give each new group a specific thing it is responsible for completing.
Watch out Splitting without clear ownership can merely move the coordination burden between teams.
In the wild
Kaufman had to align roughly 30 or 40 stakeholders while developing a proposal to measure P&G's online advertising effectiveness. Reviewing his schedule afterward showed that he had spent three solid months talking to people before the pilot proposal was ready.
→ The experience demonstrated how a resource-rich large company can lose execution time to coordination.
Kaufman cites Amazon's two-pizza-team description: once a working group exceeds the number that two pizzas can feed in a late-night meeting, it is too large and should be split.
→ A simple visual rule keeps working groups below the point where coordination overwhelms output.
Common mistakes
Equating communication with progress
A team can spend months aligning people without advancing the value-producing work.
Adding people without counting overhead
New members add capacity, but they also expand the communication network that consumes time and energy.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for managers designing project teams or diagnosing meeting-heavy work.
Not ideal for
It does not remove necessary coordination across genuinely interdependent specialist groups.
From the transcript
“for every person that you need to communicate with on a day-to-day basis to do your job, the larger that group becomes, the higher and…”
“I spent three solid months just talking to people trying to get them on the same page to create a proposal”
“up to about eight in terms of a team who is uh that is dedicated to do a specific thing is ideal”
From the episode
The Key Principles Of Running Any Business - Josh Kaufman - #215
Josh Kaufman