Parkinson’s Law is mainly interpreted as “people fill the time available”. That line was really only a hook. The original paper is really about how organisations create extra work and headcount for themselves, regardless of whether there is more genuinely useful work to do.

As organisations grow, work often grows around the work itself – layers, handoffs, approvals, reporting, internal dependency. More work about work.

That’s why adding more people, more process, more tooling (more AI?) so often fails to produce the productivity gains people expect.

Adding people can be beneficial to a point, but often far less than people might expect – and beyond a point, things usually get slower and more expensive, not faster. Doug Putnam’s analysis of hundreds of software projects found small teams were generally best, with 3-5 often the economic sweet spot, and larger teams quickly suffering diseconomies of scale.

The countermeasures to keep things as small, clear and contained as possible:

• clear direction and decision boundaries
• clear accountability and ownership
• ruthless prioritisation
• less work in flight – a culture of finishing

This is why I keep coming back to the same principle:

Fewer, better people doing less, better will usually get more done.

Not because small is always magically better. But because complexity compounds, and every extra person, process, dependency and priority adds drag.

Footnote: Probably the grossest misinterpretation of Parkinson’s Law is the idea that giving individuals less time or tighter deadlines will somehow make work happen faster. In practice, that will often just compresses time without removing the underlying drag.