We’ve all heard of those network effect laws: the value of a network goes up with the square of the number of members. Or the cost of communication goes up with the square of the number of members, or maybe it was n log n, or something like that, depending how you arrange the members. Anyway doubling a team doesn't double its speed; there’s coordination overhead. Exactly how much overhead depends on how badly you botch the org design.
But there’s one rule of thumb that someone showed me decades ago, that has stuck with me ever since, because of how annoyingly true it is. The rule is annoying because it doesn’t seem like it should be true. There’s no theoretical basis for this claim that I’ve ever heard. And yet, every time I look for it, there it is.
Here we go: Every layer of approval makes a process 10x slower