Self reply: I re-read the article with a more generous frame of mind, and they say this:
"The ceaseless pursuit of force multipliers is the only possible route to superlinear productivity improvements as an organization grows."
If we interpret this as saying that 'as we add another person, they should do something different to the previous person', then my complaint is addressed.
The rest of the article assumes you don't do that.
An old woman cornered me and a friend outside a few years back and ranted about synergy. I remember her wrinkled face and the manic glint in her eyes. Never going to lose the association between her and that word.
which discusses sublinear and superlinear scaling of complex networks.
The first law, “sublinear scaling,” is for systems that deliver resources. It means a city with a large population needs only ~80% as many roads, power lines, and gas stations per person as a city half its size. The second, “SUPERLINEAR scaling,” applies to outputs of socioeconomic activity. It means a large city produces ~120% more wealth, patents, crime, pollution, and disease per person than a city half its size.
“Remarkably, these two growth rates, 0.8 and 1.2., are showing up over and over again in literally dozens of city-related contexts and applications,” wrote Complexity Science Hub Vienna in a press release. “However, so far it is not really understood where these numbers come from.”
> This analysis assumes that a unit of work is fungible.
This is a fair assumption when we're talking about organizing work within homogeneous teams that have (and ultimately are defined by) a single shared work stream. Every individual person on the team may have things they're better at, more historical knowledge on, or a warm cache, but it's generally assumed that any team member should be able to pick up any task.
A good manger/scrum master/whatever will end up organizing work to take those things into account but it's an optimization not something fundamental.
That's true. But unlike your correct framing, the article goes out of its way to claim universality rather than describe the conditions where it's approximately true.
"... can we determine the supervenience of some set of factors on organizational performance, not just in a particular context but across all possible organizations? That is, are there necessary, a priori truths of organizational performance? [..] As it happens, there are."
I think they, and we, know that 'all possible organizations' does not mean what it says, and that's my objection. It's not a big deal, just inexact writing, or possibly inexact thinking if they mean it, which I doubt. They mean 'organizations sufficiently large to be organized into units with fungible roles'.
It also ignores ingenuity. 1 person can outdo a 100 with the right idea. Infact I was in a 10 way meeting today, first time in years and was reminded how superficial the discussion has to be as the number of people goes up. Simply because of coordination.
To see this, consider that adding a sales person to a group of engineers, or vice versa, could have a nonlinear improvement in revenue.
It’s an awful buzzword to be sure, but superlinear gains from functional diversity is called synergy and it’s possible.