The finding
Larry Greiner’s research on organisational growth, published in Harvard Business Review and republished as an HBR Classic with updated commentary in 1998, mapped a sequence of growth phases — creativity, direction, delegation, coordination, collaboration — each of which, in his analysis, tends to end in a specific and fairly predictable kind of crisis: of leadership, of autonomy, of control, or of red tape. Central to his argument was that these crises aren’t random misfortune. They’re the direct, structural consequence of practices that solved the previous phase’s problem becoming, by their continued use, the source of the next one.
Rapid growth compresses this cycle. An organisation growing quickly moves through the conditions that would trigger one of these crises considerably faster than an organisation growing steadily — which means the practices that worked at last quarter’s scale can become mismatched to this quarter’s reality before anyone has had the normal amount of time to notice the mismatch forming.
What it means in practice
Under steady, moderate growth, an execution gap opening between strategy and daily behaviour tends to accumulate slowly enough that some part of the organisation notices it before it becomes serious — a manager senses something’s off, a review surfaces a discrepancy, informal feedback catches the drift early. Rapid growth removes much of that slack. The same magnitude of drift that would have taken a year to accumulate under steady growth can accumulate in a fraction of that time, while the organisation’s capacity to notice and correct it hasn’t grown at anything like the same rate — noticing drift depends on relationships, context and institutional memory, none of which scale as quickly as headcount or revenue can.
This creates a specific timing problem worth naming: the people most likely to notice early drift are usually the ones with the longest tenure and the broadest context, and rapid growth is precisely the condition in which that group becomes a shrinking proportion of the organisation fastest, diluted by the pace of new hiring. The organisation’s noticing capacity isn’t just failing to keep pace with growth — it can be actively declining, in relative terms, at the exact moment it’s needed most.
This produces a specific asymmetry: the thing that’s growing fastest — the organisation’s size and complexity — is exactly the thing that most needs more coordination to manage well, while the thing needed to provide that coordination — shared context, working relationships, informal trust between functions — is the thing that grows slowest, because it depends on time and repeated interaction that rapid growth, by definition, doesn’t allow much of.
For how this pattern presents in other kinds of organisation, see other sectors.
Questions worth considering
- Has the organisation’s rate of growth outpaced the rate at which coordination mechanisms — formal or informal — have been rebuilt to match the new scale?
- Is there a part of the organisation currently relying on informal trust and shared context that predates the last significant wave of hiring or expansion, and might no longer reflect who’s actually involved?
- Given that execution gaps in rapid growth tend to be a byproduct of success rather than a sign of declining performance, would the organisation currently recognise the difference?
This perspective is part of Strategy Execution.
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