No matter what framework you uphold to justify your decisions, stakeholders will typically acknowledge the logic of it, but in practice ignore it.
The Great Silence, Brad Dunn on Product Coalition
It is so easy to be lean and mean when you’re small and go heavy and lazy when you get bigger. In one of lifes great mysteries otherwise capable people transform from being efficient and getting things done to being caught up in infights and bureaucracy with limited progress to show for it.
I have often wondered why this is so? Why is it that even agile entrepreneurial organizations have a tendency to become stuck, as they grow bigger? Is there some kind of inflection point for startups in which, when they reach a certain size, the fundamentals of the culture just change, and you go from focusing on customers and solving their pains to being stuck in a world of your own organizational pain? I am tempted to say yes.
Maybe this has something to do with the stakes getting bigger or the stakeholder map expanding. When people invest their time and money in helping you out, complexity grows. Relationships need to be forged, managed and balanced. Especially the balancing part takes time and skill, and getting those things right take away time, ressources and focus from what you were doing before that essentially brought you into the position, where you could take more people and money on.
It’s probably impossible to think of a threshold for when this transformation happens, and it’s equally impossible to come up with a ‘one size fits all’ fix to it. But I do think there is one general piece of advice for to startups worrying about becoming too complacent and bogged down in bureaucracy:
Keep hold of the people in your team, who are die-hard executers. Provide them with the freedom to operate and do what they do best. Grant them the flexibility to devise their own ways of scaling their efficiency, and resist the temptation to step into their way.
You need to have someone on board to provide direction and guidance for where your startup should go on it’s growth journey. In essence that’s a job for you in the founder team. Don’t fall into the trap of starting to overthink processes and stay clear of the idea that frameworks are the silverbullet to solve anything. They’re often not.
Bad ass execution have a tendency to move things forward. So keep traveling down that road.
(Photo by the blowup on Unsplash)