When you’re alone, you can just create. You don’t have to worry about what your colleagues think. You don’t have meetings on your calendar to catch up with your team. In some ways, your creation time can be close to 100%.
When you join something bigger, the need to coordinate grows exponentially. I imagine a line with a slope of -1, starting high up on the y axis (creation time) and going down towards to the x axis (team size).
Eventually, people’s lives become an endless stream of phone calls, meetings and check ins. You have no time for creation, because it’s all spend coordinating between the different stakeholders.
The way to win is to figure out how to break the mold. How to stay above that ominous line. To maintain your creation time even as team size increases. Theoretically, specialization should help you create more, but for some reason organizational coordination is so incredibly difficult that it still takes most of most peoples time.