Applying the Universal Scalability Law to organisations | the morning paper

I came across this fascinating piece by Adrian Colyer — Applying the Universal Scalability Law to organisations — and it genuinely reframed how I think about both technical systems and leadership. The core idea is that the Universal Scalability Law, typically used to model the throughput and latency of distributed systems, maps surprisingly well onto the dynamics of growing organisations. Colyer draws out four practical lessons for leaders: delegate ruthlessly, minimise the number of stakeholders involved in any given decision, be brutal about limiting how many things you work on concurrently, and never run yourself at 100% utilisation. That last point really stuck with me — the same queuing theory that explains why your database slows to a crawl under heavy load also explains why a bottlenecked CTO grinding through a full calendar destroys organisational velocity. It's the kind of cross-domain thinking that makes you see familiar problems in an entirely new light.