At what point do you have too many cooks in the kitchen to get anything done? Is this problem specific to organizational size, or does it happen with small teams as well? I tend to think it is a by product of larger organizations, where for better or worse, there are layers of bureaucratic overhead that all have opinions and want to voice them, but it can happen anywhere, at any time. I have worked for both large organizations and small, and my experience has been that this sort of problem increases dramatically in direct correlation to the overall size of the organization.

I have stumbled across a couple of blog posts in the last few days that have prodded me to think about this in more detail. Seth Godin has a great post on who you should hire and he states that most fast moving organizations (these can be large or small) are really just looking for people who can get things done. This drives home the point that at the end of the day, things need to get done, and too many cooks stymie production. Why is it so hard to just make a decision and get moving on it? The absence of a decision is bad, and by not making it and moving on, you are simply belaboring actual work. To drive this point home, Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink” deals with gut decision making and how accurate it can be, and I think it lends itself to this notion of too many cooks in the kitchen is a very bad thing.

When it is all said and done, one person needs to step up and make the decision and democratically let everyone else in the room know that they are the decision owner and they have said the final word and now let’s get to work!