How do you increase fan-out?#
Fan-out is one plus neglect time divided by interaction time (Crandall et al., 2005), which gives two ways to raise it. Increase neglect time with validation, guardrails and cheap rollback, so work stays safe longer unsupervised. Lower interaction time with better briefs, which is what a re-entry brief is built for. Most current investment in agentic systems goes into the first.
What is fan-out not good for?#
Headcount planning. Fan-out is span of control for human-agent work: a useful lens on capacity and too simple for a staffing model. It assumes streams are interchangeable and attention divides cleanly, and neither holds for work that needs judgment.
As a lens it explains why adding agents to an engineer who is already saturated yields no extra throughput, only a longer queue.