Why Adding More People Doesn't Fix It

Your project is behind schedule. The obvious solution: add more engineers. So you do. And somehow, it gets worse. Meetings multiply. Decisions slow down. The team that was struggling with 5 people is now drowning with 10.

This isn't bad management. It's geometry.

Here's the key insight: coordination capacity doesn't scale with how many people you have (the "volume"). It scales with how many people can actually talk to the outside world (the "surface"). When you double the team size, you might only add a few more people who can interface with stakeholders, other teams, or customers—while dramatically increasing internal complexity.

It's like a cell. As cells grow larger, their surface area (where nutrients enter and waste exits) grows slower than their volume (where metabolism happens). Past a certain size, the inside starves. That's why cells divide instead of just getting bigger.

The instrument below shows this directly. The teal dots are "boundary agents"—they can coordinate with the outside world. The gray dots are interior—they can only talk to each other. Watch what happens to efficiency as you add more agents without expanding the boundary.

Try it: Increase the agent count and watch efficiency drop. Then try the "line" shape—where everyone is on the boundary.

∂A

Capacity

Scale

Boundary 0
Volume 0
Capacity 0
Efficiency 0%
80
50

Surface Limits Scale

Coordination capacity scales with boundary area, not volume. This is the holographic principle applied to coordination: the information that can be coordinated is bounded by the surface, not the interior.

Watch what happens as you add more agents (volume) without increasing boundary: capacity saturates. The agents in the interior become unreachable—they can't coordinate with the outside world.

Only agents near the boundary can exchange information with the environment. Double the radius, and you get 4× the area but only 2× the boundary. Organizations that grow "inward" hit coordination ceilings.

The Physics

This derives from the Bekenstein bound through AdS/CFT correspondence and the Ryu-Takayanagi formula. Black hole entropy scales with surface area. Holographic screens encode bulk information on boundaries. Coordination follows the same geometry.

Law 6

Capacity Budget: Coordination capacity scales with boundary area, not volume. You cannot coordinate more by adding interior—only by extending interface.