The complexity trap wreaks havoc inside companies. In the name of progress, we pile on goals, priorities, tasks, metrics, checkpoints, team members, and so on. But adding these items increases complexity, which we can define in terms of the number of items and the number of connections between them. It’s no surprise that in our study, a full 65 percent of people strongly or completely agreed that their organization was “very complex—many departments, policies, processes, and plans that require coordination.”
In fact, as the number of things to be managed, tasks or people, increases arithmetically, complexity increases logarithmically. For a group of two people, the complexity level is 4, but for three people it's 8, and for six it's 36.
