Business & Entropy: Why People Programs Matter

Most of the business problems I've solved started with casual conversations. The most important one happened over coffee, when someone described a department where new hires took six months to work independently. Not because the work was complex, but because all the knowledge lived in people's heads.

The scenario was all too familiar: an established Customer Operations department where decades of process knowledge existed nowhere but in veterans' minds. When someone left, critical knowledge walked out the door with them. Different teams were unknowingly replicating the same processes - Team A building solutions that Team B had already created months earlier.

The inefficiency was staggering, but invisible.

The Entropy Problem

This experience taught me something fundamental about how businesses actually work. Much like everything in nature, everything in business also naturally moves toward disorganization - a principle known as entropy.

In physics, entropy describes how organized systems naturally break down into disorder. In business, it's the equivalent of how a clean desk becomes cluttered, or how a simple process becomes complicated over time. Without deliberate effort to maintain order, systems naturally become more complex and less efficient.

As businesses grow, entropy creeps in everywhere: teams building duplicate solutions without knowing it, processes that make sense for 10 people but break down at 100, decisions made in meetings that somehow never reach the people who need to implement them. Eventually, there are simply too many moving pieces.

I saw this pattern again at a startup that scaled from 20 to 200 people in six months. The founders and original team were tight-knit - they'd built together, worked overnight solving problems, developed an organic culture through shared struggles.

But when rapid expansion hit and the team went remote-first, that culture couldn't percolate to new hires. The institutional knowledge, the unspoken ways of working, the decision-making patterns - none of it transferred. New employees were left guessing at cultural norms that the original team took for granted.

At the Root of Entropy: People

At the root of this entropy is people. Not because people are incompetent or careless, but because people are beautifully, chaotically human.

In that Customer Operations department, it wasn't malicious that knowledge stayed in people's heads - it was natural. Busy SMEs don’t think about documenting what feels obvious to them. They create shortcuts, build workarounds when systems don't work, and rely on informal networks to get things done.

At the startup, the founders didn't deliberately exclude new hires from cultural norms - they just couldn't transfer years of shared context and unspoken understanding through a Slack message or company handbook.

People have emotions, motivations, fears, and blind spots - beautifully human, all inherently unpredictable. And all in their own way, contributors to organizational entropy. We make decisions based on incomplete information, we avoid difficult conversations, we assume others think the way we do.

So if people are the source of entropy, does that mean we need to control or eliminate the human element? 

Absolutely not. 

The answer is to build systems that work with human nature, not against it.

Ironing Out the Creases

I'll admit, I have a compulsive need to iron out creases. When I see organizational chaos, I can't help but dig into the problem: What's really happening here? How have others solved this before? What would work for this specific context?

My approach is systematic. I research what the best companies and thought leaders have done when facing similar challenges. There's almost always precedent - someone, somewhere, has tackled the same kind of entropy before. But here's the key: you can't just copy-paste culture, complexity or people. What works for a tech giant won't work for a 50 person startup.

So I take these proven methodologies and adapt them to the specific company, culture, and constraints. Every program I build is people-centered because, ultimately, people are the ones who will make or break any system. And every program is designed for the long term - not quick fixes, but sustainable solutions that can evolve as the company grows.

People Systems > Product Hacks

Here's what I've learned: the companies that win aren't the ones with the most sophisticated technology or the biggest budgets. They're the ones that understand how to harness human potential systematically.

But what happens too often is that founders get so focused on product, market fit, and scaling that they forget the "people" element of their business. They treat hiring as a numbers game, culture as a nice-to-have, and organizational design as something to figure out later. That’s when entropy doesn’t just creep in. It accelerates.

When you crack the "people" side of the business, magic happens. And it starts at the very beginning - with hiring. Not just hiring for skills, but hiring for how people will work together, how they'll contribute to knowledge sharing, how they'll adapt as the company grows.

Channeling the Chaos

Every time I build a program, I think back to that coffee conversation where it all started. The solution to 'formalizing tribal knowledge' wasn't a new software system or a complex process - it was understanding that people don't hoard knowledge maliciously, they just need better ways to share it.

The most elegant solutions aren't the ones that eliminate human unpredictability - they're the ones that channel it productively. That's where real transformation happens.

Your Entropy Stories

Every leader has their own version of that coffee conversation - the moment when organisational chaos becomes visible. Maybe it was when two teams proudly launched the same solution, unaware they'd been solving the same problem in parallel. Or when a long-time employee walked out the door, and with them went years of undocumented knowledge no one else had mapped.

What's your entropy story? That moment when the invisible became visible and you saw the beautiful, chaotic truth of how people really work?