The finding
Rapid growth is frequently accompanied by a specific and recognisable symptom: people are unsure who they actually report to, whose direction takes precedence when two managers give conflicting instructions, or which of several plausible people should be consulted before a decision is made. This is often treated as a documentation problem — the org chart has fallen out of date — but Larry E. Greiner’s research on organisational growth phases suggests the confusion is frequently a structural symptom rather than a paperwork lag.
Greiner’s model describes coordination itself as one of the distinct phases organisations move through as they grow, typically following a period dominated by delegation. In the delegation phase, managers at each site or division are given considerable autonomy, and reporting relationships are built around that autonomy — direct, relatively simple lines to a divisional or site leader who has real authority. Growth during this phase tends to be rapid precisely because decisions can be made locally without waiting for central coordination. But rapid growth of this kind eventually produces a coordination crisis: the organisation becomes too large and too fragmented for autonomous units to remain effective without some re-introduction of central coordination, and that re-introduction is exactly what disrupts previously clear reporting lines, because it adds coordinating roles and dotted-line relationships that the original structure was not built to accommodate.
How this shows up in practice
A common early sign is the emergence of matrixed or dual-reporting relationships that were never formally announced as such — a person who reports to a site leader for day-to-day direction but is increasingly also expected to align with a central function on certain matters, without either relationship having been redefined to reflect the other. Because growth is rapid, new roles and reporting relationships are frequently added faster than the organisation can update its formal documentation to reflect them, which means the confusion is often real rather than merely a documentation lag — the actual, lived reporting structure has genuinely become more complex than any single org chart currently captures.
Why it happens
The underlying cause, in Greiner’s framing, is that coordination and autonomy pull in opposite directions, and rapid growth forces an organisation to need more of both simultaneously. Local autonomy is what allowed rapid growth in the first place — decisions made close to the point of need, without waiting for central approval. But the same rapid growth eventually produces enough scale that a lack of central coordination starts generating duplicated effort, inconsistent customer experience, or conflicting initiatives across different parts of the organisation. Introducing coordination to solve that problem inevitably complicates the clean, autonomous reporting lines that supported the growth in the first place — there is no way to add central coordination without adding some complexity to who reports to whom.
Where it varies
Organisations that grow rapidly through organic headcount expansion within an existing structure tend to experience this confusion gradually, as new roles are slotted into an increasingly strained hierarchy. Organisations that grow rapidly through acquisition tend to experience it more abruptly, because an acquired entity typically arrives with its own pre-existing reporting structure, which then has to be reconciled — often imperfectly and sometimes only partially — with the acquiring organisation’s structure, producing reporting-line confusion that is immediately visible rather than one that accumulates over time.
A common misconception is that this confusion reflects a failure to plan the organisational structure carefully enough in advance. Greiner’s model suggests otherwise: the autonomous, delegated structure that later produces coordination confusion was very often the correct structure for the growth phase it was built for, and no amount of advance planning fully anticipates the specific point at which a given scale will require a different coordination approach. The more consequential failure is usually not the original design but the delay in recognising when it has stopped matching the organisation’s current shape.
The near-term consequence of unresolved reporting confusion is typically decision paralysis in exactly the cases that most need speed — a person receiving genuinely conflicting direction from two sources will often default to doing nothing, or to satisfying whichever source seems more immediately consequential, rather than resolving the underlying ambiguity themselves. The compounding consequence is a gradual erosion of trust in the reporting structure altogether: once people have experienced a few genuinely conflicting instructions without a clear resolution mechanism, they tend to route around the formal structure entirely, relying instead on whichever personal relationship seems most likely to get a fast answer — which further obscures, for leadership, what the organisation’s actual reporting structure has become.
For how this pattern presents in other kinds of organisation, see other sectors.
Questions worth considering
- Has the organisation entered a coordination phase that its current structure — built for an earlier, more autonomous phase of growth — was never designed to support?
- How many unofficial dual-reporting relationships already exist in practice, regardless of what the formal chart shows?
This perspective is part of Governance.
Your team is facing similar challenges?
Subscribe to The Riddle Ledger
Perspectives are sent as they are published, with no promotional email, and you can unsubscribe at any time.