I am currently staring at a spreadsheet that is 43 columns wide, and my left eyelid has developed a rhythmic twitch that I am fairly certain is Morse code for ‘help me.’ The blue light of the monitor is the only thing illuminating my office at 10:03 PM, and the data is screaming. We just got the green light to hire 13 new people for the support department. In the board meeting, this was framed as a victory, a necessary infusion of ‘human capital’ to quench the fires of our rising ticket volume. But as I look at the current output of my team of 23, I feel a cold sensation crawling up my spine. It’s the same feeling I had last Tuesday when I received a frantic Slack message about a botched onboarding and I stayed very, very still, closed my eyes, and pretended to be asleep just so the digital ghost of my responsibilities might pass me by.

We treat scaling as a simple addition problem. If one person can close 103 tickets a week, then 13 more people should, theoretically, close 1,339 more tickets. This is the logic of the factory floor in 1923, and it is a fundamental misunderstanding of organizational physics. In the modern knowledge economy, especially in customer-facing roles, scaling is actually a division problem. Every new person you add to a system doesn’t just add their output; they divide the clarity of the mission, they fracture the shared pool of tribal knowledge, and they multiply the communication overhead by a factor that would make a mathematician weep.

The Friction of Tribal Knowledge

Riley B., our queue management specialist, is the only one who seems to share my dread. Riley B. has this way of looking at a ticket queue that feels less like data analysis and more like forensic pathology. He sees the cause of death for every abandoned chat. Today, he’s nursing a lukewarm tea that’s been on his desk for 63 minutes, pointing at a cluster of 13 tickets that have been bounced between four different departments. ‘Look at the friction,’ he whispers. He’s right. When you have 3 people, everyone knows what everyone else is doing. When you have 23 people, you need meetings to discuss the meetings. When you add those 13 new hires, you’re not just adding capacity; you’re adding 13 different interpretations of our ‘tone of voice’ guidelines.

“When you double the team, you don’t double the output; you usually increase the output by about 23% while increasing the complexity by 333%.”

– Observational Data Point

I’ve made the mistake of hiring for volume before. I once brought on 3 new specialists in a single week during a surge, thinking I was being a hero. Instead, I spent the next 43 days cleaning up the linguistic shrapnel of their well-intentioned but wildly inconsistent answers. One told a legacy client that their plan was ‘obsolete’-which, technically, it was-but the client didn’t appreciate the technicality. They appreciated the relationship they thought we had. That one mistake cost us a contract worth $63,003. My boss asked me how it happened. I told him we were ‘scaling.’ What I meant was that we were drowning in the noise of our own growth.

The Systemic Solution: Intelligence Over Bodies

The problem is that we solve systemic problems with biological solutions. We see a hole in the dam and we try to plug it with human fingers. But humans are not plugs. They are complex, variable, and prone to 103 different moods depending on whether they had breakfast. When you double the team, you don’t double the output; you usually increase the output by about 23% while increasing the complexity by 333%. This is why startups that were nimble at 13 people suddenly feel like they’re wading through waist-deep molasses by the time they hit 103 employees.

I’ve spent the last 23 hours thinking about how to break this loop. The answer isn’t more bodies; it’s more intelligence. We need a way to handle the 103 basic, repetitive questions that eat up 83% of our day without involving a human who is eventually going to get bored and make a typo. This is where the biological solution fails and the systemic solution shines. By implementing a platform like Aissist, we can effectively decouple our growth from our headcount. It allows the system to absorb the shocks of high volume, leaving the 23 humans we already have to do the work that actually requires a heartbeat and a sense of nuance.

Against the Corporate Instinct

There is a certain irony in my position. I am a manager who is actively arguing against having more people to manage. It contradicts every ’empire-building’ instinct that corporate culture instills in us. We are taught that a bigger team equals more power, more prestige, and a bigger slice of the budget. But I’ve seen the ‘Big Team’ reality. It’s a world of 53-minute stand-up meetings where 23 people wait for one person to finish a story that has nothing to do with them. It’s a world where the most talented people quit because they spend 43% of their time filling out ‘status reports’ for the new middle managers we had to hire to oversee the new support agents.

I’m tired of the noise. I’m tired of the $1,003 ‘team-building’ lunches that only serve to remind everyone how much work is piling up while they eat overpriced tacos. We need to stop treating humans as scalable units. We are not units. We are volatile. We are the source of creativity and empathy, two things that scale notoriously poorly when forced through a spreadsheet.

If we want to actually help our customers, we have to stop building a bigger crowd and start building a better filter. We need to automate the mundane so we can humanize the exceptional. I told Sarah this morning that I didn’t want the 13 new hires. She looked at me like I had just confessed to a crime. ‘But the budget is approved,’ she said, as if the money would turn into pumpkins if we didn’t spend it on salaries. I told her I’d rather spend 23% of that budget on a system that works and give the other 77% back to the company-or better yet, give it to the 23 people who are already here and are exhausted from trying to be machines.

The cursor is still blinking. 10:43 PM. I think about the 13 people who are currently out there, looking for jobs, hoping to join a ‘fast-growing team.’ They deserve better than to be thrown into a broken system that will treat them like data points. And our customers deserve better than a 13-minute wait for a response that was copied and pasted by someone who is too tired to care. It’s time to stop the addition. It’s time to start the subtraction. It’s time to realize that in the world of scaling, less isn’t just more-it’s the only way to survive. I close the spreadsheet without saving. The twitch in my eyelid stops. For the first time in 23 days, I think I actually know what I’m doing.

Riley B. catches me on the way out. He doesn’t say anything, but he gives me a small nod, a gesture that feels like it’s worth 103 emails. He knows the system is the answer. He’s already started mapping out the logic flows. We aren’t going to grow by getting bigger; we’re going to grow by getting sharper. And maybe, just maybe, I won’t have to pretend to be asleep the next time the phone rings at 1:03 AM.