Learning cannot be left to chance

As startups scale, connectivity suffers.

When a growth stage company expands in headcount, say, from single to double digits, the complexion of the culture can’t help but change.

The more people there are, the less connected employees will feel to each other. You simply won’t be able to know who everybody is anymore. It’s harder to keep track of each other and the sense of community diminish.

Even if you do know everybody’s name on the team, you still don’t know what they’re working, when ad with whom.

Dunbar’s number explains this phenomenon. He’s the anthropologist who first suggested the idea of a cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.

As the theory goes, this limit is a direct function of human brain size. After your tribe or company or village gets to about a hundred and fifty people, the neocortex’s processing capacity can no longer cope.

Where does your organization sit among that magic number?

If you’re smack dab in the middle of a growth surge, it probably feels disorienting, frustrating and lonely.

There’s almost a grieving process. You have to wave goodbye to that small, tightly knit culture that once was, accepting the fact that cliques and local politics of each team will start to develop, as blind spots become more common.

What’s more, the aftershock of a scaling company is, knowledge becomes harder to widely capture and share across the corporation. What worked when the organization only had nine employees doesn’t work when there’s fifty or a hundred.

At one of my startup jobs, our team grew rapidly from five employees to forty in only three years. The momentum felt invigorating, but one trend we started to notice was, people were getting more intimidated to share their learnings within the larger group.

Dunbar’s number was coming into play. We didn’t have nearly the number of people the anthropologist observed, but because we grew by a factor of five so fast, employees got scared of having a bigger audience.

Particularly junior team members. Their thinking was, better to just stay within the comfort zone of my own pod, rather than bother the entire team with my insight or story, that might not even be groundbreaking in the first place.

This was not okay with me. As someone who is personally and professional obsessed with knowledge management, I told our founders, look guys, learning can’t be left to chance.

There are cultural forces working to counter our knowledge management efforts, and we need to make a change. What if we evolved the way that we nurture environment for creating and sharing ideas?

Here’s what we tried. Instead of simply posting success stories in the company chatrooms, we held biweekly meetings to share them in person, in a caring and supportive arena, catalogued the notes on the company wiki, and sent the out in a monthly digest via email.

And what we found was, team members were more likely to express genuine interest in what others were working on. People actually shared their wins and losses and learned from one another, rather than simply using technology to exchange information.

Does your company leave learning up to chance? How are you enabling knowledge management through an aware and sensitive management practice?

As your company grows in size and smarts, make sure you’re being intentional about getting what’s inside of people’s brains out and into accessible and useful form.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
Are you trying to make a plant grow, rather than understanding and addressing the constraints that are keeping it from thriving?