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From Esther comes a great story reminding us that successful work relationships depend not only on intrinsic "qualities" of the persons involved, but also on how these persons' qualities and preferences mesh together.

You sometimes hear that managing a team is "all about the people", but that's a gross oversimplification. It's about managing relationships between people, which is a much more complex proposition as soon as teams grow in size: the number of possible binary relationships between people grows roughly as the square of the number of people.

A two-person team has one relationship to manage. A five-person team has ten. That's how many there are in my household - and take it from this father of three, that's quite enough complexity to make life interesting. An eight-person team has twenty-eight; no wonder that seems to be the upper limit of effectiveness for most teams. What is at work is the Square Law of Computation, which constrains so many human activities, particularly intellectual.

For large efforts, a well-known way to cope with the Square Law is to break down the work into smaller chunks, and similarly break down the team into smaller teams. One strategy consists of fairly large "teams of teams", coordinating the efforts of fairly large units - close to the upper limit, around eight or so. Another tactic is to have people pair up - an eight-person team can be organized as four pairs, who at any given time have only six "channels" of communication among them to manage, down from the original twenty-eight; close to a five-fold reduction in complexity.

Note that these two tactics address the problem of work-related communications between people, but not the more general problem of matching people's personalities, attitude and preferences. People on a team do more than coordinate work - they also give support and respect to each other in various ways; whatever the N that measures the number of relationships, you can multiply that by the number of kinds of relationships that have to be managed. Though in terms of the Big-O notation used in the complexity theory which we computer geeks favor to discuss such things, that's still O(n²) - meaning, roughly proportional to the square of the number of people involved.

HR nightmare ? You bet.