People, Complexity, and Lines of communication

Thoughtful Thursday No.41

I have recently moved to a new store with a lot of staff.

Quite quickly it struck me that the sheer number of people would make communicating more complex.

As the team size increases the number of lines of communication starts to ramp up quickly!

The image below shows how lines of communication increase in relation to the number of people.

The store I am currently in has:

150 members of staff = 11,476 lines of communication!

Having entered a new store it is not surprising that it takes a little time to figure all this out.

There are many people to get to know and a vast amount more connections and relationships to figure out.

There will never be a need to understand every single connection, but some will be important to understand.

That number of connections is kind of staggering, and it does a good job of explaining why there can sometimes be conflict and misunderstandings.

Looking at how large the number of lines of communication number is vs how many issues arise; it is a tiny percentage.

Using this formula: n(n-1)/2 and replacing n with the number in your team it will let you know your total lines of connections. (Just paste it into google)