Org Design

When I have a problem that I want to solve quickly and cheaply, I start thinking about process design. A problem I want to solve permanently and we have time to go slow? That’s a good time to evolve your culture. However, if process is too weak a force, and culture too slow, then organizational design lives between those two.⊕ (Larson 2019, chap. 2)

the playbook that I’ve developed is surprisingly simple and effective: * Teams should be six to eight during steady state. * To create a new team, grow an existing team to eight to ten, and then bud into two teams of four or five. * Never create empty teams. * Never leave managers supporting more than eight individuals.⊕ (Larson 2019, chap. 2)

I’m skeptical of reallocating individuals to address global priority shifts … [instead] I’ve found it most fruitful to move scope between teams, preserving the teams themselves.⊕ (Larson 2019, 2.3)

Fundamentally, I believe that sustained productivity comes from high-performing teams, and that disassembling a high-performing team leads to a significant loss of producitivity, even if the members are fully retained. In this worldview, high-performing teams are sacred, and I’m quite hesitant to disassemble them.⊕ (Larson 2019, 2.3.1)

The expected time to complete a new task approaches infinity as a team’s utilization approaches 100 percent⊕ (Larson 2019, 2.3.3)

I find that teams put spare capacity to great use by improving areas within their aegis … As a bonus, they tend to do these improvements with minimal coordination cost⊕ (Larson 2019, 2.3.3)