People take it for granted that things get complicated as they grow. More people, more clients, more revenue, therefore more complexity. It sounds like a law of nature, and it gets used to justify almost anything. “It’s normal, we’ve got big.”
I’ve seen enough counterexamples to stop believing it.
I’ve worked with organizations of two hundred people where everything moved with an almost boring calm, and with ten-person studios where every week was an emergency. The difference wasn’t size, and it wasn’t the industry either. It was the number of cases that had been made an exception.
An exception is something you do a particular way because that one time it needed to be done that way. A long-standing client who pays in ninety days when everyone else pays in thirty. A service that includes, for one person, a part that usually isn’t included. A discount granted during a hard stretch and never withdrawn. A different delivery format because that contact preferred it.
Taken one at a time they’re all reasonable. That’s the problem. None of them was ever a bad decision.
But an exception has a peculiar property. It can’t be written down. Or rather it could be, but nobody ever does, because at the moment you grant it the thing looks like an isolated case and hardly worth codifying. So it stays in somebody’s head.
From that point on, that person becomes necessary. Not for their judgement, but because they’re the only place the information exists.
Ten exceptions are ten things one person has to remember at the right moment. Fifty are a company that can’t function while that person is on holiday. And the curious part is that nothing shows from outside: the numbers are good, the clients are happy, everything looks under control. The fragility only surfaces when someone leaves, or gets ill, or simply forgets.
That’s when you find out the process didn’t exist. A person who knew it existed.
When this starts to hurt, the usual reaction is to add structure. A system, a written procedure, a weekly coordination call. But structure built on top of a pile of exceptions doesn’t remove them. It makes them official. Now you have fifty special cases and a machine that has to handle them, which is two complexities instead of one.
The only thing that works is more unpleasant and needs no tools at all. You take the exceptions one by one and for each you choose: either it becomes the rule for everyone, or it stops existing.
Almost always the honest answer is the second, and almost always nobody wants to give it, because every exception has a name and a face attached. Removing it means an awkward phone call with a person who, in good faith, got used to it.
The bill has already been paid, though. It’s just being paid by everyone else, every day, in the form of attention spent remembering.
There’s a question I use when this conversation stalls. If tomorrow morning you had to explain how this works to someone who starts today, how many times would you say “except when”?
The number that comes out of that is the real measure of complexity. It has nothing to do with how many of you there are.