Both Amazon.com and Intuit have both declared publicly that their work teams should be no larger than a group that can be adequately fed with two pizzas. They do this to stay fast and nimble. I think the co-founder of Kayak was saying the same thing when he said “No innovation happens with 10 people in the room” (hat tip, Eric Lanke). Smaller teams, these leaders argue, make better decisions and they make them faster.

Turns out there’s a lot of research to back this up, as reported by Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao in their new book, Scaling Up Excellence. In this LinkedIn post, Sutton gives examples from the software industry, a hospital emergency room, and the U.S. Marines that all illustrate the power of smaller teams. When teams get to be 10 people or more, the “cognitive load” becomes too much to handle. Your brain is trying to manage the web of relationships and issues, and it just can’t. Conflict grows. Efficiency stalls. The software maker Pulse started encountering problems when it’s staff went from 3 to 8 people. They ended up dividing into teams of three or four and stayed in teams of that size as they grew to 25 people. When the hospital emergency room divided their large group of 30 doctors and nurses into “pods” of six people, the average time per patient dropped from 8 hours to 5 hours (without adding staff people).

Large teams suck, as Sutton’s post declares. If you’ve got a large team, look for ways to divide it up. Or, alternatively, you can continue to plod along slowly. Let’s see how that works out for you.