Why Growth Often Makes Good Organisations Feel Harder to Run

There’s a moment in many growing organisations where nothing is technically “broken”, but everything feels harder.

Decisions take longer. Teams rely on workarounds. Systems feel clunky. Leaders feel like they’re constantly patching things rather than improving them. And whilst this may feel like a leadership failure (trust me, I've been there!), it is just a stage of growth. You, your leadership team and organisation are not broken; you are growing.

“We have workarounds for our workarounds”

In 2019, while working with regional councils in Victoria (Australia), a leader said something that has stayed with me ever since:

“We have workarounds for our workarounds.”

Seven years later, I hear the same thing, across councils, disability services, health organisations, and social enterprises of all sizes.

People are not doing their jobs badly, organisations evolve faster than their ways of working.

As organisations grow and time evolves:

• Customer expectations change

• Regulatory requirements increase

• Services expand or diversify

• Teams grow and roles specialise

But the underlying ways of working: processes, decision making, offerings and even forms, often stay frozen in an earlier version of the organisation.

Growth exposes design gaps, not leadership gaps

What worked when:

• Teams were small

• Leaders were close to the work

• Decisions were informal

…quietly stops working at scale.

So people adapt.

They create:

• Manual handovers

• Shadow spreadsheets

• Verbal agreements

• “Just this once” exceptions

• 
  

At first, these workarounds are helpful. They keep things moving.

But over time, they pile up.

And before anyone realises it, the organisation is running on band-aids layered over band-aids. (Those 'one time workarounds' are still there 10 years later.)

Why this happens (and why it’s not anyone’s fault)

Designing new ways of working takes:

• Time

• Coordination

• Space to think

• Alignment across people and systems

Growing organisations rarely have spare capacity for that.

Instead, they prioritise:

• Delivery

• Compliance

• Urgent issues

So redesign gets postponed.

Because it feels like a luxury, even though we all know it is quite important.

The hidden cost of workaround culture

The longer workarounds remain:

• The harder they are to untangle

• The more knowledge lives in people’s heads (let's not even get into what if they leave...)

• The more pressure sits on individuals to just make it work

Over time, this leads to:

• Inconsistent customer experiences

• Burnt-out teams

• Leaders who feel like they’re constantly firefighting

And a quiet sense that growth has made things less manageable, not more.

The reframe leaders need

This stage of growth doesn’t require:

• Better people

• More effort

• Another system

It requires intentional redesign.

Not a full overhaul. Not disruption for disruption’s sake.

But a deliberate pause to ask:

• What no longer fits the organisation we are now?

• Where are people compensating for outdated design?

• Which workarounds are telling us something important?

Growth doesn’t break organisations. Undesigned growth does.

And the good news? Design gaps can be addressed, once they’re recognised. And it can be fun, collaborative and impactful.