The Big Lie About Small Teams
You’ve probably heard this a hundred times. It’s practically written into the DNA of every startup success story and Agile manifesto. The reasoning goes like this: smaller teams mean fewer opinions to juggle, faster discussions, and less risk of analysis paralysis. It sounds convincing, right? But is it really the size of your team that determines success? Or is it how well your team thinks, learns, and decides together?
This frequently shared (infamous?) diagram shows how the number of communication lines grows as the team size increases. The image is often pulled out to hammer home the point: “more people, more lines, more chaos.” And sure, it looks daunting — by the time you hit ten people, you’re staring at a web of 45 tangled connections. At first glance, it feels like an open-and-shut case for keeping teams small. But is it really?
Here’s the thing: decision quality isn’t about how many lines there are but how well those lines are managed.
Breaking the Small Team Illusion
The assumption that smaller teams are inherently better overlooks two critical truths:
1. Decision Hygiene Trumps Size:
The quality of the decisions teams make hinges on clarity and process. Small teams might have fewer communication lines, but if those lines are messy — lacking focus, structure, or purpose — the result is still chaos. The real advantage isn’t in reducing communication but in improving its hygiene.
Consider Amazon’s Narrative Process, a method famously detailed in Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. Instead of starting meetings with endless chatter or half-formed ideas, Amazon dedicates the first 15 minutes to silently reading a carefully crafted memo that outlines the decision’s context, options, and stakes. This forces clarity and ensures everyone works from the same baseline before the debate begins. Whether your team has three people or thirty, decision hygiene like this transforms complexity into coherence.
2. Collaboration Is a Superpower:
Larger teams bring diverse expertise and perspectives, which — when managed well — lead to better decisions. The issue isn’t size; it’s the lack of a structured process. Tools like decision trees, pre-mortems, and probabilistic thinking can turn what looks like communication chaos into an asset.
Reframing the Diagram
The tangled web of communication lines isn’t the problem; it’s an opportunity. Each line represents collaboration and perspective. The solution isn’t fewer lines but purposeful ones managed through a clear processes.
With the right process, more lines mean better decisions, not worse ones.
What Actually Drives Better Decisions
If size isn’t the determining factor, then what is? It turns out that decision quality comes down to three universal factors: logic, luck, and learning. These factors are pervasive — they don’t care whether your team has three people or thirty. Let’s take a look at each in turn.
1. Logic: The Foundation of Good Decisions
Whether you’re in a small team or a large one, logic remains the foundation of good decisions. It’s not about how many people are in the room; it’s about how well the group defines problems and evaluates options. Every decision is essentially a bet on the future. You rarely have all the information you want, but you still have to act. That’s where sound logic comes in — it’s about structuring your thinking to make the best possible decision with what you know.
Decision-making is like poker: you rarely have perfect information, but success depends on strategy and structure. Sound logic creates clarity and consistency, even when data is incomplete.
How to Apply It
- Use decision trees to map possible outcomes and assign probabilities. What’s the upside? The downside? How likely are they?
- Set clear criteria for evaluating options. Are you optimising for speed? Cost? Risk reduction? Making trade-offs explicit improves clarity.
- Test your assumptions. Tools like pre-mortems (imagining why your decision might fail) help expose blind spots before they become problems.
The takeaway is that sound logic creates consistency. It’s not about being right every time — it’s about making decisions that stand up to scrutiny.
2. Luck: The Wild Card in Every Decision
Luck is the unpredictable force that can sway any outcome. Luck also doesn’t care about the size of your team. It only cares about whether you’ve built a process that minimises its impact. Even the best process can’t guarantee success, just as a flawed process might still stumble into a win. The goal isn’t to control luck — it’s to minimise its influence on your outcomes.
Recognising Luck:
- When a small team succeeds, we often credit their size. But was it their size, or was it good fortune — like hitting the market at just the right time?
- Similarly, when decisions fail, we’re quick to blame the process. But sometimes, it’s just bad luck.
How to Work With Luck:
- Focus on process, not outcomes. Ask, “Did we make the best decision we could with the information we had?”
- Build resilience into decisions. Consider worst-case and best-case scenarios so you’re prepared no matter how the dice roll.
- Embrace probabilistic thinking. Instead of chasing certainty, aim to make informed bets.
The key is accepting that luck plays a role — and learning to separate its influence from the quality of your decision making.
3. Learning: The Key to Continuous Improvement
Learning is universal — it’s the difference between repeating mistakes and making progress, no matter how big or small your team is. Good decisions don’t happen by chance. They’re the product of a team’s ability to reflect, adapt, and improve over time. This is where learning comes in.
Feedback loops provide a systematic way to reflect on decisions, evaluate what worked (and what didn’t), and refine your approach. Without learning, teams are doomed to repeat the same mistakes, regardless of their size.
How to Build Feedback Loops:
- Run post-mortems after major decisions. What assumptions proved correct? Which didn’t? Focus on the process, not blame.
- Track your assumptions. Write them down when making decisions, then revisit them later. This reduces hindsight bias and helps you see where you were overly optimistic — or cautious.
- Create psychological safety. Learning thrives when teams feel safe to admit mistakes and challenge the status quo. Without this, even the best feedback loop will fail.
Learning is an investment in future success. Great teams turn every decision into a chance to refine their processes, sharpen their logic, and make better bets.
The Bottom Line
Small teams. Large teams. It’s a debate we love to have, but the truth is simple: better decisions don’t depend on how many people are in the room — they depend on how well those people think, collaborate, and learn together. What really matters is the process behind the decisions. And that’s something any team of any size can build.
Throughout this post, we’ve explored what really drives great decisions:
- Logic: The foundation of clarity and structure, helping teams make informed bets based on what they know.
- Luck: The unpredictable wildcard, which reminds us to evaluate processes, not just outcomes.
- Learning: The feedback loop that ensures every decision — whether a win or a loss — improves the next.
The next time someone points to tangled communication lines as proof that smaller teams are better, remind them: team size doesn’t drive decision quality — the process does. Great teams, big or small, thrive on clear thinking, embracing uncertainty, and learning relentlessly.
