The finding
In a widely cited 1972 paper republished as an HBR Classic, Larry Greiner, then of Harvard Business School and later of USC Marshall, described organisational growth as a sequence of phases, each ending in a crisis produced by the very practices that resolved the previous one. His own framing has stayed relevant for fifty years: managers, he wrote, come to “experience the irony of seeing a major solution in one period become a major problem in a later period.” The implication is not that organisations grow and then suddenly become complex. It is that each adaptation an organisation makes to solve today’s problem quietly changes the conditions under which tomorrow’s problem will form.
A separate line of research points to where that complexity is first felt. Donald Sull and colleagues at MIT Sloan, in a multi-year study spanning more than 250 companies, found that only 9% of managers said they could rely on colleagues in other functions or units all of the time, with roughly half saying they could rely on them most of the time. Their broader finding was that execution problems are rarely about vertical alignment — most firms’ planning and cascade processes are structurally sound. The friction is horizontal: coordination between units that increasingly depend on each other without a corresponding increase in the mechanisms that let them coordinate.
Put together, these two bodies of work suggest something specific: complexity is not a threshold an organisation crosses. It is a residue that accumulates from ordinary, individually reasonable decisions, and it shows up first as coordination difficulty between people who used to be able to work things out informally.
What it looks like in practice
Consider an organisation where the chief executive announces a strategic shift to the leadership team. Weeks later, people on the front line are describing the change in language the chief executive would barely recognise as their own. The instinctive explanation is poor cascade communication — a breakdown somewhere in the chain.
A closer look complicates that story. Comparing the original message with what eventually reached the front line shows meaningful drift at two of four reporting layers. At the other two layers, the message was transmitted essentially intact, by managers who used the chief executive’s own language. The distortion, in other words, was real — but it was not uniform, and it did not originate from a single point of failure. Something at two specific layers changed the message; something at the other two did not.
This is what accumulated complexity tends to look like from the inside: not a system that has failed everywhere, but one that has failed unevenly, in ways that resist a single tidy explanation.
Why it happens — and where the picture still varies
Greiner’s argument explains why this kind of unevenness is normal rather than exceptional. As an organisation grows, the practices that worked when everyone was in one room — informal updates, verbal context, shared assumptions about what mattered — get partially replaced by more formal mechanisms, but rarely all at once and rarely evenly across every part of the business. Some functions formalise early; others keep running on tacit understanding for years longer. The result is an organisation where the amount of structure between any two people varies enormously depending on which two people they are — which is exactly what a comparison of “layer 2” and “layer 3” in a cascade might reveal.
Sull’s finding adds a second layer to the explanation. If the underlying problem is cross-unit coordination rather than top-down alignment, then a cascading message is really passing through a series of informal coordination relationships, each with its own quality. A manager who has a strong working relationship with the level above them will tend to preserve nuance. One who does not will tend to compress, simplify, or reinterpret — not out of carelessness, but because they are filling in gaps with their own best understanding.
What remains genuinely unresolved — and this is worth stating plainly rather than resolving artificially — is whether a given instance of distortion is best understood as a structural property of the number of layers a message passes through, or as a property of the specific individuals doing the translating at each layer. Both explanations are consistent with the same evidence. Untangling them usually requires looking at more than one message passing through the same structure, which most organisations have never done.
The variation matters because the two explanations point toward different things worth noticing. If distortion tracked layer count consistently — worse at layer four than layer two, regardless of who occupied either role — that would suggest something about the sheer number of handoffs itself, independent of the individuals involved. If instead it tracked specific relationships — clean wherever a particular pair of people worked together, distorted wherever a different pair did — that would suggest the coordination quality Sull’s research describes is doing most of the explanatory work, and the number of layers is almost incidental. Most organisations that notice a distortion problem have only ever looked at a single instance of it, which is not enough evidence to tell the two apart. A pattern only becomes visible across repeated messages passing through the same structure, and few organisations have ever deliberately tracked that.
It is also worth noting what this account does not claim. It does not claim that complexity is inevitable or that nothing can be done about coordination quality between specific units — only that the evidence supports treating accumulation, rather than a single failure, as the more accurate description of how organisations arrive at the point where a leader first notices things have become hard to run.
The same pattern appears across many kinds of organisation; see Other Sectors for how it is read elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- When a message reaches the front line differently than intended, how many separate handoffs did it actually pass through, and were they all involved in the distortion?
- Which specific relationships in the organisation currently substitute for structure that does not yet exist?
- If the same message were sent again next quarter, would it distort in the same places?
More on this topic: Leadership.
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