The best work of my career happened in rooms with fewer than six people in them. Here is what those teams understood that larger ones forget.
Somewhere between the startup and the corporation, teams lose something. It is hard to name at first, but you feel its absence immediately: the ease, the speed, the sense that everyone in the room is rowing the same direction.
Fewer people, more trust
A small team cannot hide behind process. There is nowhere to defer, no committee to blame, no meeting to schedule the meeting. Everyone is visible, and visibility, it turns out, is the foundation of trust.
Great teams are not the ones with the most talent. They are the ones with the least friction.
When six people trust each other, decisions take minutes instead of weeks. Ideas travel across a table instead of through a document. The work stays warm because no one has to reheat it after every handoff.
Keeping it small on purpose
Growth is not always progress. Some of the best organisations I have seen protect their small teams the way you protect anything rare: deliberately, and against constant pressure to do otherwise. Bigger is easier to justify. Smaller is usually better.
Written by
David Okafor
Design & Technology
David covers the tools, spaces, and interfaces we live inside. He believes good design is mostly restraint, and that the best technology is the kind you forget you are using.
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