I periodically reread this post to remind myself of the communication overhead involved when scaling an org. People love to model headcount and work capacity linearly but it just never works out that way (and Coda explains why).
It's not just coherence and contention costs (though I hadn't considered them before, and they definitely exist).
The real problem is that brain-to-brain transfer of information is really hard. It is both slow and lossy. And the bigger the organization, the more times information has to transfer from one person to another.
