The common problem
Every organisation, at some point, develops a way of getting strategy done that works well enough that nobody thinks to question it. Informal check-ins keep everyone aligned. A small leadership team can hold most of the plan in their heads. Decisions get made quickly because the people making them can simply walk over and ask. None of this is designed, exactly — it emerges because it’s the most efficient way to operate at a given size, and it genuinely is efficient, for a while.
The common thread across organisations at every stage of growth is that these efficient, informal mechanisms eventually stop scaling — not because they were flawed, but because they were built for a size and complexity the organisation has since outgrown. Larry Greiner’s research on organisational growth, published in Harvard Business Review and republished as an HBR Classic in 1998, gave this pattern its clearest articulation: managers, in his account, repeatedly “experience the irony of seeing a major solution in one period become a major problem in a later period.”
How this presents at different stages
In an early-stage organisation, execution tends to run almost entirely on proximity and informal communication. Strategy execution barely needs a name at this stage, because the mechanism is simply that everyone involved is close enough — physically and organisationally — to notice quickly when something has drifted from the plan. This works remarkably well, and organisations at this stage often correctly resist adding formal process, because the informal version is genuinely more effective at this scale.
As an organisation moves into a scaling phase, that same informal proximity starts to thin, usually before anyone has consciously decided to replace it with something else. New hires haven’t absorbed the unwritten context that longer-tenured people carry. Teams that used to sit near each other are now in different reporting lines, sometimes different locations. Execution starts to depend on things that used to happen automatically — the casual conversation that used to catch a misalignment — actually being scheduled and structured, and the gap between organisations that notice this shift early and those that don’t becomes visible here, often as the kind of coordination friction and drift described elsewhere in this territory.
In a more mature organisation, the requirements shift again. By this stage, most organisations have built some formal structure to replace the informal mechanisms that no longer scale — reporting cycles, defined decision rights, structured reviews. The risk here is different: not an absence of structure, but structure that has itself outgrown its usefulness, tracking a version of the organisation’s complexity that no longer matches its current reality, in exactly the way Greiner’s research describes solutions ageing into problems. A quarterly cycle designed for a business with three product lines doesn’t automatically remain well-suited once that business has grown to fifteen, even though nobody made a specific decision that it should stay the same.
This later-stage risk is arguably harder to notice than the earlier ones, precisely because it hides behind evidence of maturity. An organisation with formal structure in place can reasonably feel it has already solved the coordination challenges that troubled it at an earlier stage — and that feeling of having already solved the problem is exactly what makes it easy to stop asking whether the specific structure in place still fits.
What explains the variation
What differs across these stages isn’t whether execution is hard — it’s what, specifically, execution currently depends on that the organisation is at risk of losing without realising it. At the earliest stage, that dependency is informal proximity. In scaling organisations, it’s whatever partial, ad hoc replacements for that proximity have emerged, often unevenly across different parts of the business. In mature organisations, it’s whether the formal structures built to replace informal coordination have themselves kept pace with how much the organisation has continued to change since they were put in place.
This variation is precisely what Greiner’s broader framework describes: practices appropriate to a given phase becoming, in time, exactly what the next phase needs to move past. The organisations that navigate this most successfully aren’t the ones that avoid the transition — every organisation goes through it — but the ones that notice which stage-specific dependency they’re currently resting on, before that dependency has already quietly failed.
Sector adds a further layer of variation on top of size. A professional services firm, where senior people are in frequent direct contact with the work regardless of headcount, can sustain informal coordination well past the point where a manufacturing or logistics business, with more distributed operations from an earlier stage, would already need something more deliberate. The underlying pattern holds across sectors — dependencies age out and need replacing — but the point at which that ageing becomes consequential shifts considerably depending on how the work itself is organised.
Looking for your own sector? The Other Sectors page points to the closest match.
Questions worth considering
- What is strategy execution currently depending on that worked well at the organisation’s previous size, and is there any reason to believe it still works as reliably now?
- Has anything been deliberately built to replace informal coordination as the organisation has grown, or has that gap simply been left to whoever happens to notice it first?
- For organisations further along — is there a formal structure currently in place that was built for a level of complexity the organisation has since outgrown?
More on this topic: Strategy Execution.
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