What Has Become Harder to Do Well Simply Because Your Organization Has Grown?

Imagine it’s a Friday afternoon in the year 2010, going into a long-awaited and much-needed long holiday weekend. At 3 p.m., Jane in Accounting at a small- to mid-sized manufacturing company discovers an invoice with significant errors. She walks over to Operations to find Ben, the person who knows the account, and the problem is solved in ten minutes. It’s a good thing she caught this in time and was able to avoid an embarrassing moment for the company, because the invoice in question was for a long-time loyal and major customer.

Now, imagine it’s Friday afternoon in the current year, going into a long-awaited and much-needed long holiday weekend today. That small- to mid-sized manufacturing company has grown considerably to become a major enterprise with satellite offices across the nation and a centralized corporate office that relocated to a major metropolitan city in the South.

The same customer is still loyal, but their contract exists in another system. Jane retired years ago, Accounting and Operations are centralized, and Ben, the person who would have negotiated such an exception back in 2010, left eight years ago because relocating to the new city where the corporate office is located would have been too disruptive for his family. Despite the technology that would have enabled him and many others to work remotely, the company chose otherwise. It’s really too bad they lost Ben.    

It’s 3 p.m., and unfortunately, a major issue arises with invoicing, but nobody is quite sure who has authority to correct it. So, Accounting opens a ticket, which Operations forwards to Sales. Sales copies Legal, which then requests documentation. The customer is very annoyed, so Gary in Customer Retention escalates and schedules a meeting with everyone he can think of—a valiant attempt to get the customer, who’s threatening to cancel their account, off his back.

The organization has more people, more technology, more expertise, and more resources than it had back in 2010. Yet solving relatively simple problems has somehow become incredibly convoluted, cumbersome, and generally difficult. Why?

Growing Pains: Not Just for Children

While growth is usually considered one of the most important indicators of success, it comes at a cost. Becoming a larger organization—with all the bells and whistles and bigger budgets for technology and such—doesn’t necessarily guarantee that efficiency and capability scale to keep up at the same pace. In reality, growth often exposes problems that are otherwise hidden because organizations rarely recognize them until they begin to interfere with performance. In other words, the business has scaled, but the organization’s ability to align its systems and processes and coordinate smoothly internally has not. Growth does more than increase volume. It significantly changes how work gets done. And, without proper planning it gets painful—not just for the company and its employees, but also for its customers.

As organizations grow, lots of things change. The need to specialize increases as new functions emerge, more people become involved in decisions, and processes get intertwined as they traverse more organizational boundaries. And while information travels farther and technologies multiply, additional layers of management soon appear. Work that once depended on informal relationships must eventually depend on well-designed systems.

Planned properly and armed to the fangs with every tool and resource necessary, everything should transition smoothly. Sounds simple, right? Research says otherwise. In their 2026 review of 193 studies on organizational scaling, Jansen and Tippmann identified organizational scalability as being distinct from simply increasing resources or expanding a business model. That distinction matters because many problems attributable to “growing pains” are actually signals that yesterday’s ways of working no longer fit today’s organization.

Although scaling can generate sustained performance, “from (tech) start-ups and established firms to nonprofits and social ventures, the ability to scale—or expand users, customers, or revenues rapidly while managing rising complexity—has become a defining organizational challenge” (Jansen & Tippmann, 2026).

Consider what happens to decision-making. In a smaller company, people may know instinctively who has authority because they know one another. As the organization grows, however, informal clarity disappears. If decision rights aren’t redesigned as the company grows—and people come and go—decisions become unclear and tend to move upward because nobody is quite sure who can make them.

Leaders then inadvertently become bottlenecks as people wait; more meetings that should have been an email become the norm, and eventually, decision-making becomes the scapegoat as it appears to be a problem when, in reality, the underlying problem is structural in nature—one that breeds ambiguity and finger pointing. Then, before you know it, someone decides training is needed and then we’re down a completely different rabbit hole.

When the Solution to Complexity Creates More Complexity

As organizations experience the challenges associated with scaling, they, of course, will do whatever they can to regain control. They may implement more reporting, hold more meetings, or require more layers of approval. Perhaps they formalize project management processes, open more communication channels, or write more policies. Individually, these seemingly important and necessary additions make perfect sense, but collectively, they may very well build a bigger, hairier, gnarlier performance problem.

New tools meant to increase productivity and efficiency often add new layers of complexity instead: more notifications to check, more dashboards to update, more digital busywork. Part of the problem may lie in the long-held belief that visible effort should be the primary measure of productivity, pressuring workers to always be “on.” A third of respondents to a survey conducted by software firm Visier say that they prioritize work that is most visible—regardless of whether that work is actually valuable to the business. And respondents to Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends survey report that 41% of their time is spent on work that doesn’t contribute to the value their organization creates [and] only 22% of respondents say their organization is highly effective at simplifying work (Harrington et al., 2025).

Deloitte points specifically to meeting overload, outdated processes, nonessential work, and layers of complexity that consume organizational capacity (Harrington et al., 2025). This aligns with a recurring pattern of organizations creating work to manage the difficulty of doing their work. The original problem still exists, but now people must also navigate the mechanisms created to compensate for it.

Growth Also Changes an Organization’s Capacity for Change

Another complication to consider is that organizations rarely grow without going through significant change. This means that with growth comes new systems, structures, managers, technologies, processes, acquisitions, roles, policies, customers, and ways of working. Yet organizations often manage these as separate initiatives even though the same people must absorb their cumulative impact while meeting performance expectations.

According to Prosci, “change saturation occurs when the number of changes you’re implementing exceeds the capacity of individuals in your organization to effectively adopt and use those changes” (Prosci, 2026). This creates an important organizational contradiction. Growth increases the need for change while simultaneously increasing the coordination demands placed on the people expected to implement it.

Then, when adoption slows, deadlines slip, customers encounter problems, or people begin creating workarounds, leaders may conclude that employees are resistant, managers need training, or teams need to communicate better. Sometimes they do, but often they don’t. Simply put, it’s time to consider that sometimes people are forced to compensate for an organization whose operating capability hasn’t kept up with its growth.

Has Your Organization Scaled—or Has It Simply Gotten Bigger?

Let me be clear about something. Complexity isn’t inherently dysfunctional or bad. And I’m not suggesting that large organizations need to go back to doing things as if it were 2010 all over again, or that they ought to behave like a startup. Realistically, we know that a complex organization serving a wide array of customers, operating across various markets, managing greater risk, and employing people with specialized expertise will naturally require structures that a 40-person company doesn’t need. The problem arises when growth is treated carelessly—as merely an addition or something that happens haphazardly—as opposed to being planned for, designed, and developed with intention.

Now, imagine what that organizational dystopian reality looks like. Processes become outdated because nobody reassesses them on a regular basis. The approval process becomes tedious because streamlining it feels risky. New priorities emerge and compete with old ones. Departments silo and start to function according to their own measures of success, thereby often falling out of alignment with larger overarching organizational goals. Workarounds become the norm. Managers inherit responsibilities that the organization has never equipped them to execute effectively. Each individual decision appears reasonable while the cumulative system becomes increasingly difficult to navigate.

Organizational growth demands that leaders ask different questions. Instead of asking only, “How do we continue growing?” leaders should periodically ask, “What has become harder to do well because we have grown?” and “What does this tell us about the organization we now need to become?”

Growth—similar to technology—exposes the limits of old operating assumptions. This useful information creates an opportunity to reconsider decision rights, simplify work, redesign processes, strengthen cross-functional coordination, assess cumulative change, clarify accountability, and deliberately build the capabilities that a larger organization now requires. Becoming capable of operating effectively at that size requires organizational design, disciplined change, and continuous attention to how work actually happens. And sometimes the first step is simply recognizing that the frustrating problem everyone has learned to work around is telling you something much bigger about the organization itself.

References

Harrington, S., Commisso, C., Eggers, W. D., Moss, K., Alstein, T., & Duda, J. (2025, March 24). When work gets in the way of work: Reclaiming organizational capacity. Deloitte Insights. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/human-capital-trends/2025/reclaiming-organizational-capacity.html

Jansen, J. J. P., & Tippmann, E. (2026). Scalability and scaling in management research: Toward a process model integrating fragmented literatures. Academy of Management Annals. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2025.0099

Prosci. (2026, August 7). 6 strategies for reducing change saturation. https://www.prosci.com/blog/6-strategies-for-reducing-change-saturation