Add people, and each one pulls less

With eight on the rope, each person pulls less than half of what one pulls alone

Contents4

The rope experiment
Tug of war inside organizations
One owner per responsibility module
Where to look in a diagnosis

Series「People Don't Follow the Org Chart」 · Part 8 of 13 · Part 2 · How structure shapes behavior
Prologue：The people who aren't on the org chart

Add people to a team and each of them pulls less. A project moves fast with three people and slows down once it grows to eight. The manager's first thought is "communication cost," so more meetings get added to fix it, and the project slows down further. Someone measured this over a century ago.

The rope experiment

In the 1880s a French agricultural engineer, Max Ringelmann, ran a simple experiment. He had people pull a rope and measured the force. One person alone averaged 63 kilograms. Three people together should have pulled 189. They pulled 160, or 53 each. Eight people pulled 248, or 31 each. That is less than half the individual figure. The more people on the rope, the less each one pulls.

The result sat forgotten for almost a century and was rediscovered in the 1970s. A 1974 experiment by Ingham and colleagues took it apart. Subjects were told they were pulling with others, while the others only pretended to pull. The subjects' force still dropped. So the loss isn't only coordination, people pulling out of sync. Part of it is motivation. When you know others are on the rope, you ease off a little. That second part became known as social loafing.

Researchers still argue about the proportions. How much is coordination and how much is motivation varies a lot by task. They have also found that when each person's contribution can be seen, the motivation loss nearly disappears. For a manager, that is the finding that matters.

With eight on the rope, each person pulls less than half of what one pulls alone

Ringelmann’s rope experiment, 1880s. Force per person in kg. Bars scaled to one person alone (63 kg) = 100

1 personalone
63
3 people160 in total
53
8 people248 in total
31

Why it drops　coordination loss, and motivation loss (social loafing)

01One ropeA group goal. Nobody can see who pulled how much
02Add peopleEach person pulls a little less again
03Cut the ropeResponsibility modules, one owner each. When contributions can be seen, motivation loss nearly disappears

Don’t fix a late project by adding people. Cut the rope: one module, one name.

Figure 1. In Ringelmann’s experiment force per person fell from 63 kg alone to 53 kg with three and 31 kg with eight, less than half the solo figure. Motivation loss nearly disappears when contributions can be identified, so splitting work into modules with a single owner works better than adding people.

Tug of war inside organizations

Most work in organizations is a tug of war. Several people pull toward one goal, and nobody can see how hard each one is pulling. A sales team's quarterly target, a project's delivery date, a department's KPI. Each is one shared rope.

Here is how the Ringelmann effect plays out. The goal is collective, so everyone eases off a little, which is a rational thing to do. Contributions are invisible, so the people who pull harder go unrecognized, and after a few quarters they ease off too. Add more people and both get worse. Adding people to save a schedule puts the rope in more hands, and each hand grips it more loosely.

Japanese organizations have an amplifier, the tradition of collective responsibility. "Everyone is responsible together" is a virtue in Japan. Against the Ringelmann effect, it is exactly the condition that makes each person's effort invisible.

One owner per responsibility module

If motivation loss nearly disappears when contributions can be seen, the direction is obvious. Cut the rope into pieces.

The way I do it is with responsibility modules. Divide a team's work into blocks, each with a defined output and a defined boundary, and give each block exactly one owner. A "lead owner" doesn't count, and neither does "jointly responsible." One name. Others can contribute. But when the block fails and you need to know who to ask, or when it succeeds and you need to know whose result it is, there is one answer.

A few rules make it work. The number of modules should roughly match the number of people, so everyone is the sole owner of at least one and has a rope of their own. Write the module boundaries down, and decide in advance who owns whatever falls on a boundary. Otherwise the gaps between modules turn into new zones of collective responsibility. And tie evaluation and bonuses to module outputs. The team's total goal sets the direction. It shouldn't be what distributes the money.

This rule sits under the middle track of my three-track pay design. The grade sets base pay, the role sets responsibility pay, and results set the bonus. The role component pays for sole ownership of one responsibility module. Part of what went wrong in A 50% raise and he still left was responsibility that nobody could see.

Where to look in a diagnosis

When I diagnose an organization, I ask one simple question. Which of this team's outputs can you point to a single name? The outputs you can't pin to one name are where Ringelmann is at work. That share is usually much larger than the manager thinks.

Take your team's quarterly target. How many modules with a single owner could you split it into?

In this series
Previous：Your bilingual staff are not translators
Next：Four kinds of relationships, and why pay design goes wrong

For what individual-only metrics miss, see my reading of Muir's super-chicken study, where selecting hens by whole-cage performance cut mortality from 68% to 8.8%.

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