How to Scale Humans

As a developer you learned to scale software. As a manager you will learn to scale humans.

In software cloud architecture there are two ways to scale: vertically or horizontally. When you scale vertically you are adding size to a specific piece of compute. For example if you scale a VM vertically you do so by adding more memory and compute to the instance, but you still just have one instance. Thus vertical scaling has a pretty well defined limit.

When you scale horizontally you add more copies of the VM instance and balance the load between the copies. The amount of scaling that you can do horizontally is significantly larger than vertically. In fact it is so different that I rarely see anyone suggest vertical scaling for new projects.

Now to the question at hand, how do you scale humans? I would argue that, much like virtual machines, you have two options to scale yourself. One has some very hard limits and the other is almost limitless.

Lets use the paradigm of scaling in the cloud as a way to model this in ourselves.

Vertical Scaling

When you scale yourself vertically you are adding to your own competency and capacity. You remain one entity and you work to become more knowledgeable, effective, efficient and focused. This is a very good thing and should be the goal of every human being.

I think about how to scale myself daily and have had many breakthroughs over the years. Most recently I have discovered some great tools for this in the personal knowledge management (PKM) space that I am going to talk about in future posts.

Vertical scaling has it limits though. There is only so much one person can know and only so much time that one person can execute in. While vertical scaling is valuable, it pales in comparison to horizontal scaling when we want to get more done.

Horizontal Scaling

Horizontal scaling requires that the work be spread out to multiple individuals. This allows you to take the work and parallelize it to the point where the constraints of time that existed for a single contributor are now no longer linear. You can scale time to the degree that you can break the project into individual parallelizable pieces.

We can also remove the limit of knowledge because, unlike scaling VMs, with people we are not creating duplicates. With more people you are able to bring in more knowledge and more view points. So scaling horizontally also removes the limit of knowledge to the degree that you are able to hire enough differing viewpoints and still get consensus.

Leadership

Vertical scaling is building your own knowledge and discipline and horizontal scaling is leadership. Once you see that you can get more done by scaling out instead of always scaling up you will understand the power of being able to lead. Once you can lead you will be able to solve problems so large that you would have spent years trying to solve them on your own.

As Jocko says, “All your problems are leadership problems.” If this is true then it means that good leadership is also the solution to all of your problems. This is why it is imperative that you learn to lead and to scale horizontally in your role.