The finding
Organisational clarity — the shared understanding of who decides what, who answers to whom, and what a given role is actually for — is not a fixed asset that an organisation either has or lacks. It is a moving target that has to be renegotiated at intervals as the organisation grows, and the interval is shorter than most leadership teams expect.
The clearest treatment of this comes from Larry E. Greiner’s research at Harvard Business School, later continued at USC’s Marshall School, published in Harvard Business Review as “Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow.” Greiner’s central finding, drawn from long observation of growing companies, is that organisations move through distinct phases of evolution, each of which ends in a crisis triggered by the very practices that made the previous phase work. A structure that gave the organisation clarity at one size becomes the source of confusion at the next. Greiner described the pattern directly: managers “experience the irony of seeing a major solution in one period become a major problem in a later period.”
This matters for clarity specifically because clarity is usually anchored in something concrete — an org chart, a set of job titles, a decision that was made and communicated once. Those anchors do not expire on a schedule. They simply stop matching reality at some point after growth has continued past the assumptions built into them, and the gap is rarely visible until someone acts on the old version and gets a result nobody expected.
What it means in practice
Consider an organisation where a middle manager approves almost every request that reaches her, including several she privately considers unwise. On the surface, this looks like a confidence problem — a manager who lacks the backbone to push back. But on the two occasions in the previous year when she did refuse a request, both refusals were overturned above her within a week, in one case without her being told it had happened.
Her behaviour is not a personality trait. It is a rational adaptation to an environment where her decisions do not reliably hold. Somewhere in the organisation’s growth, her role’s authority stopped matching her role’s title, and nobody updated either the title or the actual authority to bring them back into line. What looks like weak management is, on closer inspection, an accurate reading of how much authority she actually has — which is less than her position implies.
This is a common shape for clarity loss during growth: not a single dramatic breakdown, but a slow divergence between the formal description of a role and the working reality of it, visible only when someone tests the boundary and finds it isn’t where the org chart says it is.
Why it happens
Clarity erodes during growth for reasons that have little to do with individual failure. Roles that were defined when the organisation was small carry assumptions — about who else is in the room, how much context a decision-maker has, how quickly an escalation reaches someone who can resolve it — that were true at ten people and stop being true at fifty. Nobody revisits the assumptions because nobody wrote them down as assumptions; they were simply how things worked.
New layers of management are added to handle volume, but the decision rights that used to sit with one person get redistributed informally, based on who happens to be available or confident, rather than through any deliberate reassignment. The org chart is updated for reporting lines faster than it is updated for actual decision authority, so the chart and the reality begin to describe two different organisations.
And because growth is usually treated as a success to be managed rather than a structural event to be governed, the renegotiation of clarity tends to happen reactively — after a decision goes wrong, after a customer complaint reveals nobody owned an issue — rather than as a deliberate checkpoint built into how the organisation scales.
Where it varies
The erosion is not uniform. Organisations that grow through steady headcount increases tend to lose clarity gradually, in ways that are hard to notice until several small confusions accumulate into a visible pattern. Organisations that grow through a sudden event — a large contract win, a geographic expansion, an acquisition — tend to lose clarity abruptly, because the assumptions behind the existing structure are invalidated all at once rather than eroded slowly.
Founder-led organisations often show a distinct version of the pattern: clarity was never fully formalised in the first place because the founder held enough context to resolve ambiguity personally, and growth is what first makes the absence of formal clarity visible, rather than what causes it. Organisations with an existing layer of professional management tend to notice the erosion earlier, because someone in the structure is specifically watching for it, even if nobody is yet acting on what they see.
A common misconception is that lost clarity is primarily a communication problem — that better meetings, clearer memos, or a more frequently updated org chart would resolve it. Communication can help people find out faster that a decision was overturned or that a role’s authority has shifted, but it does nothing to address why the authority shifted in the first place. Treating a structural mismatch as a communication gap tends to produce more communication about the same underlying confusion, rather than less confusion.
The consequences of unaddressed clarity loss tend to compound rather than stay contained. A manager operating with less authority than her title implies will, over time, either escalate more than necessary — adding friction and slowing decisions that should not need to travel upward — or continue making decisions nobody above her is confident will hold, which erodes trust in exactly the layer of management growth was meant to create. Neither outcome announces itself as a single failure. Both accumulate quietly, in the same way the original clarity eroded, until someone notices that decisions in a particular part of the organisation take longer, or feel less reliable, than they should.
For how this pattern presents in other kinds of organisation, see other sectors.
Questions worth considering
- When did the organisation last review decision rights deliberately, rather than simply inheriting them from an earlier structure?
- For any role that feels less authoritative than its title suggests, what evidence exists that the authority described in the title still holds — and who would need to confirm that it does?
More on this topic: Governance.
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