Here are some selected quotes from Chapter 4 of Scaling Up Excellence by Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao. What you are not getting by just reading these quotes are the real life stories and examples which brings the principles to life. This was one of my favorite chapters and I definitely learned somethings I didn't know before.
Chapter 4 Cut Cognitive Load
"...scaling entails subjecting people to an onslaught of unfamiliar, difficult, and upsetting changes and chores. The sheer volume and complexity often overwhelms the 'working memory' of the individuals who do it, which produces blind spots and bad decisions and saps their willpower. Researchers call this condition 'cognitive overload.'" p. 99
"As organizations expand and mature, rather than rationing or subtracting load, leaders and teams often pile on so many metrics, procedures, and chores that people lose the capacity and willpower to do the right things." p. 99
"...cognitive load is another reason that scaling is the Problem of More. It can tax human minds and organizations beyond what they can bear. When that happens, people ignore their best intentions, work on the wrong tasks, shift focus too often, and perform less well at everything they attempt." p. 101
"After devoting nearly fifty years to studying group effectiveness, the late J. Richard Hackman concluded that, for most tasks, the best size is four to six."p. 102
"Two Pizza Rule: development teams can be no larger than the number of people who can be fed by two pizzas." p. 102
"Scaling requires a pehchant for parsimony, for understanding the nuances of an organization and its people so you can make things as simple as possible - but no simpler." p. 110
1. Subtraction as a Way of Life
"Leaders and teams that spread excellence act the same way, ruthlessly spotting and removing crummy or useless rules, tools, and fools that colg up the works and cloud people's minds." p. 110
2. Make People Squirm
"If you aren't upsetting people, you aren't pushing hard enough." p. 117
"...people become risk averse and distraught at the 'prospect' of losing something they already have, even if they get something more valuable instead. These negative reactions to losing something familiar are magnified when people invest time and effort in something." p. 118
3. Bring on the Load Busters: Subtraction by Addition
"The writer Austin O'Malley said, 'Memory is a crazy old woman who hoards colored rags and throws away food .' Not only do human beings have lousy memories, but the things that we do recall, ruminate over, and act on are often trivial and useless - 'colored rags' that clog our consciousness, sapping ouir capacity to remember and act on more crucial concerns." p. 119
4. Divide and Conquer
"The division of labor always creates demands for integration, especially when multiple teams and departments in different locations must mesh activities together in tight and timely ways. Even when coordination is less daunting, every team and organization depends on people with enough general knowledge to grasp how the system fits together and enough particular knowledge about each part to do specific tasks well." p. 125
5. Bolster Collective Brainpower: Increase Cognitive Capacity Instead of Adding More People
"There are times when outsiders bring fresh ideas that help broken organizations and projects abandon obsolete and destructive mindsets. . . . Yet too many tales of outsiders who gallop in to save the day don't have happy endings." p. 127
"Whether you are selecting a leader, scaling up a new team or organization, or running an existing project team, sticking with savvy insiders and stable teams and blending people who have worked together before are better paths. Stable teams are more adept at drawing on each other's strengths and countering their weaknesses, and they mesh together their ideas and actions more efficiently and reliably." p. 127,128
"If you are forming a new team, or fixing an old one, try to bring in at least two or three people who have worked together effectively before." p. 128
"Speaking of talented women, if you want a smarter team, make sure that it has a lot of them. Groups with higher percentages of women had greater 'collective intelligence,' performing better on cognitively demanding tasks, from 'visual puzzles to negotiations, brainstorming, games and complex rule-based design assignments." p. 129
"People also have a greater capacity when they aren't worn down by work and worry. When people get enough sleep, they are more adept at difficult tasks, are more interpersonally sensitive, make better decisions, and are less likely to turn nasty." p. 130
Give Ground Grudgingly
"Scaling requires a balancing act. The aim is to travel forward in the sweet spot between too much and too little complexity as your footprint expands to more people and places - and without swamping people with more load than they can handle." p. 132
"As organizations and programs grow, the same superflat hierarchy and lightweight systems that promoted success in the early days can gum up the works" p. 133
"The art of giving ground grudgingly requires biding your time and staying vigilant until clear but less than catastrophic problems pop up - a few muffed handoffs, minor screw ups by good people, or a surprising conflict." p.135
"...running an organization as close to maximum capacity as possible for as long as possible is a recipe for scaling disaster." p. 135
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