The observation
A business grows — revenue, headcount, sites, product lines, whatever the axis — and somewhere in that growth, leaders notice the organisation has become harder to manage. Not failing. Harder. Meetings take longer to reach a decision. Information that used to travel by itself now needs to be chased. Work that once fit in someone’s head now needs to be written down, and often isn’t. The natural first read is that management has simply not kept pace: more people, more capacity needed, more structure required, and the business hasn’t yet built it.
That explanation is not wrong so much as incomplete. It treats management difficulty as a resourcing gap — add more managers, more process, more systems, and the difficulty should ease. In practice, organisations that do exactly this often find the difficulty persists, or reappears somewhere else. The symptom is real, but the cause it points to is usually not “not enough management.” It is that the kind of management the organisation relies on has stopped matching the organisation it now runs.
Why it happens
A longitudinal study from Harvard Business School examined how organisations move through phases of growth, and found a pattern that has held up for more than five decades since: each phase of growth is built on a particular way of coordinating people, and that way of coordinating works well right up until the organisation outgrows it, at which point it becomes the source of the difficulty rather than the solution to it. Larry Greiner, writing in the Harvard Business Review, described how practices that resolve one period’s problems become the next period’s constraint — what he called the irony of watching “a major solution in one period become a major problem in a later period.”
This matters because it reframes what “harder to manage” actually means. It is rarely a general, diffuse increase in difficulty. It is usually a specific coordination mechanism — a habit, a relationship, a informal understanding — reaching the edge of what it can carry. A weekly conversation that once kept five people aligned does not scale gracefully to fifteen; it either becomes a much longer meeting, fragments into sub-conversations that lose coherence, or quietly stops happening and nobody replaces it. None of those outcomes feel like “the business needs more management.” They feel like specific, sudden friction in specific, previously smooth places.
Research on organisational design going back to Jay Galbraith’s work on information processing adds a second layer: as organisations grow, the volume of information that needs to move between people to coordinate their work rises faster than the number of people does, because the number of possible connections between people grows non-linearly with headcount. A team of five has ten possible pairs who might need to coordinate directly. A team of fifteen has 105. The organisation has not tripled in coordination burden — it has grown by more than a factor of ten.
What it looks like in practice
Consider an organisation where a second office opens to support growth in a new region. Three years later, its practices have visibly diverged from the original site — not dramatically, but noticeably, in ways that generate friction whenever the two offices need to work together. The instinctive diagnosis is insufficient oversight: the second office was not supervised closely enough as it found its own way of working.
Look closer and a different picture emerges. The original office’s practices were never fully documented — they were learned by proximity, by new joiners sitting near experienced ones and absorbing how things were actually done. When the second office opened, it received formal documentation covering perhaps a third of what the first office actually does day to day. What travelled was the explicit portion. The rest — the judgment calls, the unwritten exceptions, the sequencing that everyone in the original office simply knows — could not travel, because it had never been made explicit in the first place. The second office did not diverge through negligence. It diverged because there was nothing else it could have done with what it was actually given.
This is a common shape of the “harder to manage” symptom: the organisation’s real operating knowledge was distributed unevenly, held informally, and grew faster than anyone’s ability to notice how much of it existed only in specific people’s heads. Growth does not create this gap. Growth exposes it, because growth is precisely the condition that requires the knowledge to travel somewhere it has never had to travel before.
A related pattern shows up in decision-making. Bain & Company’s research into decision rights, based on a survey of executives at more than 350 companies, found that only a small minority felt their organisation’s decision-making structure genuinely helped it outperform competitors — and that decisions most often stall at recognisable bottlenecks: between global and local levels, between a central function and a business unit, between two functions, or between the organisation and an outside partner. Growth multiplies the number of places where these bottlenecks can form, simply by multiplying the number of interfaces between parts of the business that now need to agree on something.
The contextual variation matters too. A professional services firm growing through headcount experiences this differently from a multi-site retail business growing through locations, which experiences it differently again from a company growing through acquisition. What is constant is not the specific friction but the underlying mechanism: something that worked when informal now needs to be explicit, and the gap between those two states is where the difficulty concentrates.
For how this pattern presents in other kinds of organisation, see other sectors.
Questions worth considering
- Which parts of how this organisation currently runs exist mainly as shared understanding rather than anything written down or structurally supported?
- When something recently felt harder than it used to, was that a resourcing problem, or a coordination mechanism reaching its limit?
- Is the difficulty spread evenly across the organisation, or concentrated at specific interfaces — and what does that concentration suggest?
More on this topic: Growth.
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