(And Why Hiring More People Often Makes It Worse)
By Nathan Whittacre
Founder & CEO, Stimulus Technologies
Nathan Whittacre is Founder & CEO of Stimulus Technologies and a veteran IT strategist with 30+ years of experience helping over 800 businesses scale securely and efficiently. He specializes in cybersecurity, AI strategy for business leaders, and technology-driven operational efficiency. Nathan is MIT-certified in AI for Business Strategy and author of The CEO’s Digital Survival Guide.
Executive Summary
- As companies grow, many CEOs experience a frustrating paradox:
execution slows, decisions feel heavier, and problems that once seemed manageable now feel impossible – even with better people, more tools, and more experience. - This isn’t a leadership failure. It’s a predictable outcome of business complexity, coordination costs, and scaling systems beyond what humans can manage linearly.
- In this article, we’ll explore why adding people often makes business problems worse, how Brooks’ Law applies far beyond software, and how AI and automation can reduce coordination friction instead of increasing it.
This is a leadership and systems challenge faced most often by CEOs, founders, and executive teams in growing organizations.
Computer Science Lessons for Business Leaders on Scaling Complexity
In computer science, there’s a class of problems known as intractable. These problems aren’t unsolvable in theory. They’re unsolvable exactly, at scale, within any reasonable amount of time.
One of the most common examples is the Traveling Salesman Problem. Given a list of cities, what’s the shortest route that visits each city once and returns home? With a few cities, the answer is straightforward. With dozens, the number of possible routes grows so fast that even powerful computers abandon the search for a perfect solution.
Instead, they rely on approximations — solutions that are “good enough” to move forward.
I’ve been thinking about this concept a lot lately, because many CEOs are wrestling with business problems that feel eerily similar. Problems that technically should be solvable, but somehow resist every attempt to pin them down cleanly.
Why Leadership Feels Harder as a Business Scales
From the outside, these situations often get labeled as execution issues. Maybe the team isn’t aligned. Maybe accountability is slipping. Maybe the organization just needs more people or better processes.
From the inside, it feels different.
It feels like progress slows even as effort increases. Decisions generate more follow-up than resolution. Every initiative spawns meetings, exceptions, and clarifications that no one anticipated at the outset.
Many leaders quietly internalize this as a personal failure. Why does this feel harder now, even with better people and more experience? The uncomfortable truth is that some business problems stop scaling linearly long before the company stops growing.
That isn’t a leadership flaw. It’s a systems reality.
A Lesson We Learned Decades Ago and Then Forgot
In 1975, Fred Brooks published The Mythical Man-Month, a book about software project management that remains painfully relevant today. Its most famous insight, now called Brooks’ Law, is deceptively simple:
Adding manpower to a late project makes it later.
At first glance, this feels counterintuitive. More people should mean more output. But Brooks observed something fundamental: as teams grow, coordination costs increase faster than productivity.
New hires require onboarding, context, and oversight. Senior contributors lose time answering questions, reviewing work, and realigning decisions. Communication pathways multiply, and misalignment becomes inevitable.
What Brooks identified wasn’t a software problem. It was an early description of an intractable coordination problem.
Brooks’ Law — the idea that adding manpower to a late project makes it later — applies directly to modern business operations. As organizations scale, coordination costs increase faster than productivity, turning execution into a complex systems problem rather than a talent problem.
This is why adding headcount often slows execution in growing companies instead of accelerating it.
Why This Hits Modern CEOs Even Harder
Today’s organizations have unknowingly recreated Brooks’ Law at scale.
We operate with remote and hybrid teams, layered compliance requirements, cybersecurity mandates, and sprawling technology stacks. Every new employee adds value, but also introduces new handoffs, permissions, and decision paths.
Each additional person increases:
- Communication overhead
- Decision latency
- Risk of misunderstanding
- Management attention required to keep things aligned
At a certain point, the organization crosses a complexity threshold. Beyond that point, delegation creates more work before it reduces it. Meetings multiply faster than outcomes. Leaders become traffic controllers instead of strategists.
This is the business version of an intractable problem.
Why Hiring More People Stops Fixing Execution Problems
Early-stage companies thrive on brute force. Everyone knows everything, context is shared, and decisions move fast because the system is small enough for humans to hold in their heads.
As the company grows, variables multiply. Dependencies stack. Precision matters more, and mistakes carry greater cost. At that stage, adding people often increases complexity faster than it increases throughput.
At scale, growth introduces:
- More dependencies between teams
- More handoffs and approvals
- More opportunities for misalignment
- More work required just to keep context synchronized
This is why onboarding feels exhausting, senior leaders feel more overloaded instead of less, and execution gaps widen despite strong talent. The issue isn’t motivation or competence. It’s that the system has outgrown linear human coordination.
Leadership as a Routing Problem and Decision-Making Problem at Scale
Here’s where the computer science analogy becomes uncomfortably accurate.
Modern leadership isn’t about making one decision well. It’s about continuously routing priorities, resources, attention, and risk across teams, systems, vendors, and stakeholders.
Every route interacts with every other route. Just like the Traveling Salesman Problem, the number of possible paths explodes as scale increases. There is no perfect answer: only workable approximations.
Trying to optimize every decision exhausts leaders and organizations alike.
Why This Isn’t a Talent or Culture Issue
This is where many leadership narratives break down. We assume better people, stronger culture, or clearer accountability will fix the problem.
Those things help. Until they don’t.
Once complexity crosses a certain threshold, human effort becomes the bottleneck. That’s why high-performing teams still feel stuck and experienced CEOs feel like they’re treading water despite doing all the “right” things.
The issue isn’t intelligence or effort. It’s coordination load.
How Intractable Problems Are Actually Managed
In computer science, intractable problems aren’t solved by working harder. They’re managed by changing the approach entirely.
That usually means:
- Reducing the problem space
- Accepting approximation instead of perfection
- Automating what doesn’t require judgment
- Iterating quickly instead of optimizing endlessly
This is where automation — and especially AI — quietly changes the equation in business.
Not by being “smarter” than humans, but by removing humans from the parts of the system where humans add the most friction.
How AI Reduces Coordination Costs in Growing Businesses
Most AI discussions miss this point entirely. For executives, AI is most powerful when used to reduce coordination overhead, not to replace human judgment.
AI’s real value isn’t that it thinks like a person. It’s that it doesn’t need context meetings, status updates, or clarification emails. It doesn’t forget decisions, and it doesn’t add communication overhead.
When applied thoughtfully, AI and automation:
- Absorb routine micro-decisions
- Triage information before humans engage
- Standardize execution where variability adds risk
- Collapse multi-step workflows into single actions
In systems terms, AI removes edges. Fewer edges mean lower coordination cost. Lower coordination cost restores momentum.
Why This Feels Like Relief to Good Leaders
The CEOs I work with aren’t trying to eliminate people. They’re trying to eliminate friction.
They want fewer surprises, fewer manual reconciliations, fewer “how did this slip through?” moments. They want to spend their time on strategy, growth, clients, and judgment calls that actually require experience.
When automation is implemented well, something subtle but powerful happens. The organization feels lighter, not because people disappeared, but because the system stopped asking humans to do machine work.
The Real Shift in Leadership Thinking
This moment demands a reframing of leadership itself.
The job is no longer to solve every problem perfectly. It’s to decide which problems must remain human and which should be removed from human coordination entirely.
That isn’t abdication. It’s stewardship.
Practical Takeaways for CEOs and Operators of Growing Businesses
- If execution feels slower as you scale, the issue is likely coordination, not competence
- Hiring solves capacity problems, not complexity problems
- Past a certain size, leadership becomes a routing and prioritization challenge
- AI and automation create leverage by reducing coordination overhead, not by replacing people
- The goal isn’t perfection. It’s sustainable forward motion
A Final Reassurance
If running your business feels harder than it used to, even with better people, better tools, and more experience, you’re not failing.
You’re leading a system that has crossed into a new complexity class.
The solution isn’t more effort. It’s structural relief.
And the leaders who recognize that distinction won’t just survive this phase. They’ll finally feel forward motion again, without burning themselves or their teams out in the process.
For many leadership teams, this realization becomes the starting point for rethinking systems, workflows, and how technology, including AI, should actually support growth.
Structural relief doesn’t come from working harder. It comes from designing organizations that scale without compounding friction.
Want to understand whether your organization is positioned to accelerate growth by reducing coordination friction with AI?
Join our upcoming executive webinar series to learn how leadership teams are applying AI and automation to simplify operations, improve decision flow, and regain momentum — without adding unnecessary complexity.
