This essay expands on the “Resources and Capacity” thread in Management Retrospective.

There is a rather counterintuitive phenomenon: when a team suddenly has enough people and budget, things actually get slower. More resources should bring more possibilities, yet the result is that work gets sliced finer, reporting lines multiply, coordination grows longer, and genuinely high-return projects become rarer and rarer.

The problem isn’t the resources themselves; it’s how many high-quality decisions the organization makes with them.

How the bloat grows once resources are plentiful

When resources are abundant, every local unit can apply for a small project, a new process, or another layer of management. Each one looks reasonable on its own: this step needs strengthening, that process is worth automating, this spot lacks an owner. Added together, the organization slowly grows an increment of additions that no one is accountable for as a whole.

If the prioritization and decision-making mechanisms aren’t strong enough, the bloat quickly outpaces capability:

  • Low-quality decisions multiply, because every request has hands available to carry it out;
  • Real problems get repackaged into tasks that report better — high-ROI problems are often hard to articulate and hard to push forward, while “adding a new initiative” looks better in reporting;
  • High-ROI opportunities end up with no owner, because people are scattered across a pile of small projects that all “look like work is being done.”

The real waste isn’t a failed project; it’s everyone being busy while no one is accountable for the most important problems.

First see what busyness the organization is creating

The answer isn’t simply cutting headcount, nor making everyone push harder. First go back to actual investigation and see clearly “what busyness the organization is creating”:

  • Where are users actually stuck? Which step is blocking them at high frequency?
  • Where is there high-value demand that hasn’t been met yet?
  • Which work is just busyness the organization manufactures itself — meetings, form-filling, repeated alignment — that changes no user outcome when done?

The third question is the easiest to overlook. A common turning point looks like this: the team stops starting from the project list and instead goes to the field to observe real work — and often finds that most of the investment is optimizing marginal steps while the truly high-frequency blockers have no owner. At that point, re-prioritize, shut down a batch of low-value projects, and concentrate resources on the core problem; resources haven’t decreased, but decision quality has gone up.

Resources only amplify the outcome of decisions

The opposite of the resource curse isn’t “fewer resources” but high-quality decisions: clear goals, sufficient information, matched accountability, and the courage to stop low-value projects. Resources themselves are neutral — with good decisions they amplify capability; with poor decisions they amplify bloat.

So “should we expand now that resources are abundant” always ranks below “can the organization keep discovering real problems.” The former is a resource question, the latter a decision-quality question; unless the latter is solved, the former only makes things worse.

To judge whether an organization has fallen into the resource curse, I use a very plain signal: ask three different people “what is the most important problem right now”; if the answers all differ, resources will be diluted no matter how many there are; conversely, if everyone points to the same core path, then resources are a real amplifier.