Fast-scaling teams must rebuild trust and psychological safety as their social systems expand, Charlotte de Jong Schouwenburg mentioned in the video The Human Scalability Problem taken at Dev Summit Munich. She suggested using intentional, redundant communication across multiple formats to keep everyone aligned. Cross-team rituals, buddy systems, and rotating facilitators can reduce silos by building bridges between teams. Leaders accelerate this by modeling the vulnerability they want to see.
When you have a social system that changes significantly, you’re going to have to fill up that trust tank or that safety tank again; you have to find new dynamics, De Jong Schouwenburg said. When you are scaling at high speed, you also need to onboard the social systems of teams, which takes time. Scaling humans is about maintaining coherence and psychological safety as the surface area of interaction expands.
De Jong Schouwenburg suggested designing a communication architecture with intentional redundancy. Repetition is gold, she said. Use different times, different media, and different ways of repeating the core messages, context, and goals. Keep reminding people of the bigger picture:
This way, you can fill in the gaps of the people who you would otherwise lose because they just didn’t get the message. It also allows people with different brain strategies to digest the information in their preferred method, therefore avoiding knowledge gaps or people who are zoned out.
Trust grows through familiarity, and familiarity requires contact. To foster cross-functionality and enable those who have to work together at some point to know each other personally, De Jong Schouwenburg suggested building bridges between teams and creating structured opportunities for cross-team connection. She mentioned several ways to do this :
- Multi-team offsites
- Virtual coffees or shared rituals
- Cross-site pairing (buddy systems), demos, or learning sessions
- Rotating facilitators to reduce dependency on one "hub" person
These activities can reduce the risk of siloed thinking and strengthen collaboration before teams hit pressure moments.
De Jong Schouwenburg suggested monitoring human metrics as intentionally as engineering metrics. Healthy human systems behave predictably under stress; unhealthy ones fracture, she said.
She suggested tracking early indicators of the levels of resilience, like:
- How openly teams raise risks
- How often cross-team misalignment causes rework
- Participation levels in retrospectives
- Variability in team cultures across sites
Leaders and technical influencers have outsized impact, De Jong Schouwenburg said. She suggested that they should model the behavior they want to scale. When they admit uncertainty, say "I was wrong," or genuinely invite dissent, they normalize vulnerability and accelerate psychological safety.
It’s vital to "walk the talk"- show behaviour, rather than talk about it:
People imitate not what leaders say but what they demonstrate, tolerate and reward.
As you scale, the job of leaders is to keep the human system reliable under pressure, De Jong Schouwenburg said. You should ensure that teams can work as best as they can, and facilitate them to do the best job they can. For that, we really need to look at that human system, she concluded.
InfoQ interviewed Charlotte de Jong Schouwenburg about human scalability problems.
InfoQ: What can companies do to spot human bottlenecks?
Charlotte De Jong Schouwenburg: In highly technical, fast-scaling environments, bottlenecks often aren’t just in systems, but they’re in human architecture. Human bottlenecks emerge when information, decisions, or collaboration depend too heavily on one person, one relationship, or one fragile link between teams.
Companies can spot these bottlenecks by monitoring the health of the social system. Practical indicators include decision latency, cultural drift, and single points of human failure or overloaded connectors.
For instance, cultural drift between sites or functions can happen when teams operating in different regions or disciplines develop inconsistent norms, context gets lost, and rework increases. This is often a hidden bottleneck that compounds as scaling accelerates.
InfoQ: How do you recognize decision latency and communication problems?
De Jong Schouwenburg: Some signals of issues with decision latency are that decisions are taking longer as the organization grows, or having work which is waiting for a single person’s approval, knowledge, or context. Slowing decisions are often an early sign that psychological safety is low or roles are unclear.
Your organization may have single points of human failure, where work stalls when one person is sick, overloaded, or leaves, or teams rely on "heroes" rather than shared ownership.This signals low redundancy in relationships and communication channels.
Finally, you may suffer from overloaded connectors. This is what can happen when some employees naturally become the "glue" of the team: the bridge between people, teams, or organizational layers. When they become overwhelmed, you see confusion, misalignment, and communication breakdowns.
Companies that intentionally watch human dynamics can prevent burnout, speed up delivery, and maintain coherence as the surface area of interaction expands.