Big Teams Aren't the Problem — Bad Connections Between Them Are
Photo: large diverse business team meeting in modern UK office boardroom, via thumbs.dreamstime.com
For the better part of two decades, the technology sector has exported one idea above almost all others: keep teams small. Amazon's famous 'two-pizza' doctrine — never let a team grow beyond what two pizzas can feed — has been repeated in boardrooms, business schools and conference keynotes with the fervour of scripture. The logic is seductive. Small teams move quickly, communicate easily and avoid the bloat of committee thinking.
But as we travel the country delivering collaboration workshops to British organisations, we keep encountering a problem the two-pizza rule cannot solve: the work itself does not fit inside a small team. An NHS trust cannot deliver patient care with squads of six. A national retail chain cannot restock its stores, manage its supply chain and serve its customers through startup-sized units. The reality of British enterprise — public and private — is that large groups of people must coordinate across boundaries, every day, often under pressure.
The orthodoxy doesn't survive contact with British reality
The two-pizza rule was conceived in a company whose core product was, fittingly, coordination between teams. Amazon succeeded not because its individual teams were small, but because it invested enormously in the mechanisms that let those teams connect: shared documentation standards, common vocabulary, structured communication protocols.
Most British organisations borrowed the first half of the idea and ignored the second. They carved themselves into small units and then wondered why the seams between those units became the places where projects stalled, information died and blame accumulated.
We see it constantly in our workshops. Marketing doesn't know what operations is doing. Clinical teams and administrative teams in the same trust operate with entirely different assumptions about priorities. Scale-up engineering teams ship features that customer support hears about on the day of release. The problem is almost never that a team is too big. It is that the connections between teams are left to chance.
Silos are a design failure, not a personality flaw
It is fashionable to describe silos as a cultural failing — as though departments hoard information out of tribalism or inertia. In our experience, that diagnosis is unfair and, more importantly, unhelpful. Silos emerge naturally when three things are missing: shared context, structured contact and joint accountability.
Remove any one of them and even the most well-intentioned team will retreat into its own world. People cannot share what they don't know others need. They won't build relationships that no process ever brings them into. And they certainly won't prioritise another department's success if their own objectives make no reference to it.
The remedy, therefore, is not to shrink teams — an option that is often impossible anyway when you are running a 24-hour hospital service or a national distribution network. The remedy is to engineer the connections deliberately.
Three ways to bridge the gaps without cutting headcount
1. Build shared context through structured exchange. One of the simplest exercises we run involves pairing members of different teams and asking them to explain their current priorities to each other, then to identify one thing the other team does that makes their work easier and one thing that makes it harder. The conversations are frequently uncomfortable — and consistently valuable. Most cross-team friction, it turns out, is not malice but genuine ignorance of what the other side is dealing with.
2. Create recurring contact, not one-off events. A joint away day does more for the caterer than for collaboration if nothing follows it. What works is rhythm: monthly cross-team stand-ups, rotating attendance at each other's planning meetings, secondments measured in weeks rather than months. The organisations we work with that have made real progress treat inter-team contact as a scheduled operational activity, not an aspiration.
3. Align objectives across boundaries. If every team's targets are exclusively internal, no amount of goodwill will produce collaboration. We have seen public sector teams transform their working relationships simply by adding a shared objective — a joint outcome both teams are measured on — to their annual goals. It is a modest administrative change with an outsized behavioural effect.
Bigger thinking, not smaller teams
There is something quietly defeatist about the two-pizza philosophy when applied to British organisations: it implies the answer to complexity is to avoid it. But the great challenges facing UK employers — integrated care systems, net-zero supply chains, digital transformation in creaking legacy environments — are, by their nature, problems that exceed the capacity of any small group.
The businesses that will navigate them successfully are not those with the smallest teams, but those with the strongest connective tissue: leaders who understand that collaboration between teams is a skill and a system, not a mood. That is the work we devote ourselves to at TeamFactor, and it is work that has never been more necessary.
