The Camel's Back
The observation comes as very straightforward:
When a problem in a group is directly proportional to the number of members, you can never hope to solve it by increasing the number of members.
It reads almost obvious; but we fall into this trap too often.
For example, take the problem of space debris: if the probability of a Kessler syndrome1—the problem—is directly proportional to the amount of orbiting satellites, you can never expect to solve it by launching more satellites.
Organizational growth shows a similar effect. With more people, there is a combinatorial increase in the amount of people interactions, therefore the coordination and communication overhead increases proportionally. When such overhead becomes a problem, you should never expect to solve it by bringing more people. This is nothing else than Brooks' law at play. Brook’s law is an observation about software project management according to which "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". It was coined by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month. Reads obvious, still it’s a mistake made over and over.
Now the inverse of the effect is not always true. If the number of actors in a group is the source of its misery, dramatically reducing that number will not necessarily solve things. Moreover, it will just make the problem morph. Cutting the people in a project in half may reduce coordination overhead, but who will do the work the missing people were doing? (assuming they were doing something). Deorbiting most of the functional satellites would make orbits surely less crowded, but we would lack essential data and services we use in our every day’s life. Growth brings pains, but decreasing that growth brings other pains.
There is this known English idiom about a straw that broke the camel’s back. There is always one last straw (action) that causes an unpredictably large and sudden reaction, because of the cumulative effect of each previous straw. Growth awareness should be taught in primary schools.
NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler proposed in 1978 a scenario in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) due to space pollution is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade in which each collision generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions.