The Day the Wheels Don’t Quite Come Off
This article is about the point at which informal ways of working stop being a strength and start becoming a liability.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
— W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming
When informality works
Informal ways of working are often the reason a startup business functions at all. They allow people to move quickly, solve problems through conversation, and keep decisions close to the daily reality of the work. Responsibility may not be neatly defined, but it is usually understood well enough for things to keep moving, because when something is unclear it still feels fairly obvious who to ask or where to go.
That works because the business is still small enough for context to travel naturally. People are close to one another, the number of moving parts remains manageable, and coordination happens through familiarity rather than formal design. At that stage, informality is often a genuine strength. It gives a business speed, responsiveness and a certain liveliness that more structured organisations can struggle to reproduce.
What changes as the business becomes more complex
The difficulty is that these conditions do not last forever. As the organisation grows, people are no longer working alongside everyone else, context becomes unevenly shared, and the work itself starts to depend more heavily on what is happening elsewhere in the business. What once held together through instinct and proximity is now being asked to cope with a level of complexity it was never really built for.
You can often see this in the way communication starts to expand. Meetings multiply because people need more shared context before they can act. Messages grow longer. More people are copied in, sometimes helpfully, sometimes in the faint hope that responsibility might land on somebody. Work still moves forward, but with more checking, confirming and circling back than before. None of this looks disastrous in isolation, yet taken together it often points to a business that is compensating for weak coordination rather than resolving it.
Decision making is usually where the strain becomes most visible. In a smaller organisation, decisions tend to sit close to the work because the people involved can see enough of the picture to act. As complexity increases, that clarity begins to fade, especially when an issue cuts across teams or affects several parts of the business at once. Decisions still get made, but the route towards them becomes slower, less direct and more dependent on senior intervention.
What to look at when the strain starts to show
Over time, those decisions begin to drift upwards. The founder, or a very small number of senior people, becomes the place where problems are resolved because they hold the broadest view of the business. In the short term, that works well enough. In the longer term, it conceals the real issue, which is that the organisation has started to rely on individual effort to make up for ways of working that no longer carry the weight.
This is often the stage where the business still looks perfectly functional from the outside. The client receives the proposal, the project is delivered, and nothing has obviously gone wrong. Yet a surprising amount of effort is being spent behind the scenes keeping things moving. A revised quote, for example, may pass back and forth because Sales assumes Operations has confirmed capacity, Operations thinks Finance is checking the numbers, and Finance is waiting for the Founder to approve an exception.
By the time the answer goes back, valuable time has disappeared into clarification, chasing and rechecking. Nothing has broken in any dramatic sense, but far more of the work is now being carried by memory, goodwill and senior intervention than the structure itself.
This is the day the wheels don’t quite come off.
That is why this stage is so easy to misread; because the business is still operating, the assumption is often that the friction is merely the price of growth. Yet as Henry Mintzberg has observed in his writing on how organisations actually operate, coordination is not optional; it is the work of management itself, whether it is made explicit or left to emerge informally. The truth is simple; the organisation has outgrown the informal coordination that served it well at an earlier stage, and is now asking it to hold more complexity than it can comfortably bear.
What this moment calls for is not a grand overhaul, but a proper look at how the business is actually working: where decisions sit, where responsibility is unclear, where handovers are breaking down, and where too much still depends on the founder joining the dots. That kind of clarity is not administrative tidiness for its own sake. It is what allows a growing business to move with less friction, make decisions more cleanly, and stop paying for progress through wasted time and senior intervention.
Left too long, these things rarely fall apart in one dramatic moment. More often, the centre stops holding well before the wheels actually come off.
References and further reading
Thompson, J. D., Organizations in Action
Simon, H. A., Administrative Behavior
Mintzberg, H., Managing
Selected commentary on owner-led and growing businesses, Institute of Directors