The Ringelmann Effect

We're going way back to 1882 for this one.

A French professor and agricultural engineer named Max Ringelmann had his students pull on a rope -- first individually, then as a group.

His finding: the group's total pulling force was always less than the sum of its parts. If a single person generates 1 Pulling Unit of force, two people pulling together might only yield 1.9. Three people, maybe 2.75. Ten people, 9. The pattern holds as the group grows.

In other words: when people work together, each individual pulls a little less than they would alone. This is what was humbly dubbed The Ringelmann Effect.

First off -- what an interesting finding. Let's just sit with that for a second.

Second, that's a little bleak. The best things happen from individuals working together; the moon landing, the grass people from the Super Bowl, the Apollo 13 rescue. My whole educational career, I endured dozens of group projects under the pretense that this is how the world works, and presumably it works this way because it works.

But it also makes sense. I was only "enduring" these projects because I was feeling this failure to pull from folks. And I'm definitely not immune either. It makes sense from an ECO101 perspective too. If you believe that giving 99% effort will have no effect on the result, you'll choose 99% every time. Multiply that across a whole group, and the rope stops moving like it should.

I think about this at work, with friends, in our democracy -- it's all over the place.

I don't have answers to this, but I've been looking around for ways this is addressed. As a software engineer, in every team I've been on, we've stressed individual contributions. "Tickets" cannot be assigned to multiple people -- there is always an owner. Sure, there are multiple tickets in the queue, but at the end of the day, one (and only one) person is responsible for the delivery. This feels like an engineered solution to pull out the maximum Pulling Units from contributors.

There's something to say about coordinated efforts. Maybe everyone is trying to pull, but when you have too many people on the rope, getting everyone pulling in the same direction gets hard. Everyone might think they are giving 100%, but in reality due to the exponentially increasing difficulty in coordination, they aren't seeing that 100% in the output.