The concept of surface area comes from Shane Parrish, who has an excellent podcast called the Knowledge Project. He captured the idea that the larger and more complex our lives become, we create more surface area we have to manage. Our careers, our family, friendships, activities etc., all add to our surface area – and more surface area can dilute our capacity to execute.
Now think about all the things we captured in the last story that we need to run an organization. Suppose you could reduce all of them to physical objects. People and office space are more obvious. But pretend all the processes, policies, technology you use is all converted to an object. The more of them you have, and the more complex they are, drives your quantity and size of the object. Picture this big pile of stuff as your organization.
What’s the best way to organize it?
Back in Grade 7 Math, we learned that the most efficient structure for any given volume is a sphere. Given the same volume, a sphere has about 28% less surface than a cube. Now picture the modern organization (your organization?). They tend to be designed in ‘box like’ fashion. We have org charts with ‘boxes’ for roles. We have distinct departments where we create clear roles and responsibilities, often where we could have people ‘stay in their lane’ (or box), and create silos. A lot of effort is put in to identifying and the ongoing management of the clarity of those boundaries and creating ‘rules of engagement’. Volume organized less efficiently creates way more surface area to manage.
But without the level of clarity that comes with box like linearity, won’t we just have chaos? How will people know what to do?
To solve for that problem, we need to look at a counterintuitive concept in traffic engineering that reduces the expense, increases the capacity and improves safety of how we organize traffic – a rare ‘triple win’.
We’ll cover that in our next story…
