A small team and a magical tool: a cosmic journey of hitchhikers through over-complexity
Exploring how small teams struggle with control, understanding, and integrating complex systems. Together with Douglas Adams
Let’s talk about small teams, adopting technology, and managing complexity.
To do that (and, honestly, also as an exercise in managerial thinking and capacity building), let’s travel into deep, mind-bending space with the crew of the starship Heart of Gold, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
Before we start, here’s a small playlist for your journey into over-complexity.
What are we given?
1. Space
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Doesn’t this sound like a market description?
2. The team
Arthur Dent — a human without a role, strategy, or resources. He’s just… in the team.
Ford Prefect — an insider who “knows something,” but doesn’t actually manage.
Trillian — the most competent one, yet in a male-dominated team, she is perceived more as a point of tension. Unfortunately familiar.
Zaphod Beeblebrox — the formal leader. Chaotic, impulsive, seeing the team mostly as an inconvenience on the way to his pan-galactic ambitions. Like many dysfunctional leaders, he had two heads (in his case, quite literally).
Marvin — the emotional intelligence of the system. No one listens to him. A bit paranoid.
The team may look dysfunctional, but only to the same extent that about 90% of small teams are functional or dysfunctional: assembled, at best, around a shared vision and goals, and more often by personal connections or by pure coincidence.
3. The ship (the tool, the system): The Heart of Gold
The Heart of Gold is the first starship powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive.
At the heart of the ship is a small golden box. Press a button — and the ship passes through every point in the universe at the same time, landing somewhere.
In the book, it is often where it “needs” to be. Otherwise, the book would be hard to write!
In reality, total randomness. Randomness of randomness.
Stepping out of the analogy
This is what we actually have:
a huge space (a market), full of possibilities and probabilities
a not-so-functional small team (too often it is a bunch of generalists)
and a tool (system) so complex that no one really understands how it works
Some result somehow exists, right?
But because of the tool’s complexity, that result is often unpredictable.
And more importantly, it cannot be deconstructed.
Which means:
you can’t properly analyze failures
you can’t really learn
you can’t reliably fix mistakes
The key trap
Our Heart of Gold (and yes, you’ve got it right - this is a metaphor for tools, AI, automation, platforms, and “smart” infrastructures) promises simplification: less effort, less planning, less coordination… and less thinking, less control.
It often:
multiplies the number of system states
makes consequences unreadable
breaks causality
The overly complex infrastructure comes with a promise:
It will remove complexity and deliver results.
The actual result:
Complexity becomes invisible and grows. The result may still exist, but it becomes weakly controlled.
This is over-complexity disguised as simplicity.
Why are the risks higher for small teams
Complex systems can:
survive hidden complexity
distribute consequences across roles
fail to notice cognitive degradation for a long time
Small teams:
live on direct connections
depend on understanding why something works
have no buffer for errors
When the link between action and result breaks down, a small team loses orientation and control.
If capacity (knowledge, skills, expertise) does not keep up with the growing complexity of the system, this is where the Heart of Gold really starts to break things:
Thinking: Solutions always “work,” the ability to formulate problems atrophies.
Responsibility: It becomes unclear who is responsible for what, because your outcomes no longer clearly follow your decisions.
Learning: The team doesn’t learn, but moves between states.
So what can a small team actually do?
Prefer tools you can explain to yourself and to others.
Preserve visible cause-and-effect, even if it’s slower.
Make sure the team comes first, not the system.
And there is a harder, structural choice underneath all of this.
Either you grow expertise and capacity to match the complexity of the system (which is especially difficult for small teams full of generalists), or you simplify the system to the level of the team’s actual expertise.
Often, the only workable option is doing both.
The main takeaway from this small cosmic journey
Let me be clear: I’m not mocking technology itself.
In our story, the Infinite Improbability Drive solves the problem of movement.
It does not solve the problem of navigation, decision-making, or control.
The temptation to build ever more complex systems in the name of optimization is understandable.
But in small teams, such systems should be limited by something very simple:
our ability to truly understand (and explain) how they work, and our real capacity to manage both the process and the outcome.
Without that understanding, even a team of brave cosmic travelers can end up anywhere except where it actually meant to go.
The end 🚀
Thanks for reading!
A quick housekeeping note before you move on.
My name is Danil, and this is Make it Work — a shared space for knowledge and support for generalists working in small teams and initiatives.
I write about how projects, ideas, and people actually survive and grow when resources are limited and roles are blurry.
No growth hacks. No bad-taste coaching. I promise.
See you next week!
Best,
Danil | Make It Work