Specialization Sweet Spot

One trade-off that occurs in business is the attempt to find the right amount of DivisionOfLabor to maximize productivity. With too little division of labor, potential synergy is lost. With too much division of labor, productivity suffers from greater communication and management overhead. Somewhere in the middle is a sweet spot, or GoldilocksSolution, for which productivity is maximized.

This trade-off can be generalized to include other specializations. The increasing power and synergy of more pieces is countered by the increasing complexity of more pieces.

Too many rules make a software methodology complex. Too few rules make a software methodology ineffective.

Too few pages make a book hard to understand. Too many pages make a book hard to understand. (see ShortBooks).

Mental models, theories, and abstractions have a usefulness sweet spot. Hopefully, as the number of elements of a model grows, the elements will periodically be culled so the model stays “sweet.

Forces working against SpecializationSweetSpot include UrgeForCompleteness?, UrgeForCorrectness?, UrgeForInternalConsistency?, UrgeForApproachability?, BigYellowSpine and UrgeForProvability?.

Synergy is something that may appear if previously unrelated things are brought together. Does the author mean parallelism is lost?

No. The author was using definition 1, not 2.

: synergy (s?´er-j? noun
: plural synergies
: 1. The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects.
: 2. Cooperative interaction among groups, especially among the acquired subsidiaries or merged parts of a corporation, that creates an enhanced combined effect.

See CollectingSeashells, WikiPagesAboutBreakingThingsIntoPieces