Most growing organisations don’t fail because they’re reckless. They fail because the ways of working that once felt sensible quietly stop scaling.
You’re not imagining it. The approach that worked when you were twelve people doesn’t work at thirty. The informal agreements that held things together start to crack. Decisions take longer. Things slip through gaps that didn’t used to exist. Nobody can quite explain what changed, but everyone feels it.
This is normal. It’s also fixable.
Good governance isn’t about becoming corporate. It’s about adding just enough structure to stay in control as complexity increases. The trick is knowing when you’ve crossed the line from “we’ve got this” to “we probably need to grow up a bit.”
The discomfort of transition
Growth creates friction. Not because you’re doing something wrong, but because the system that worked at one scale doesn’t work at the next.
When you’re small, informal works. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing. Decisions happen in the room. If something’s unclear, you ask. The whole organisation fits in your head.
As you grow, that stops being true. People work in different locations. Teams have different priorities. Not everyone was there when the original decision was made. The informal system that relied on proximity and shared context starts to break down.
This feels uncomfortable. It feels like you’ve lost something. And in a way, you have—you’ve lost the simplicity of being small. But you’ve gained something too: capability, reach, impact. The discomfort is the cost of that growth.
This isn’t permanent discomfort. It’s transition discomfort. Once the right structure is in place, it disappears.
The question is whether you respond to the discomfort by adding the right structure, or by pretending the old ways still work when they clearly don’t.
When informal stops scaling
Informal systems are elegant. They’re fast, flexible, and low-overhead. They work beautifully until they don’t.
When “someone’s job” stops working, it’s usually because implicit ownership has broken down. Tasks that used to get done because “obviously Sarah handles that” stop getting done because Sarah’s now managing three people and nobody realised the task needed to be explicitly assigned.
This isn’t about discipline. It’s about assumptions. When you’re small, you can operate on shared assumptions because everyone has the same context. As you grow, those assumptions diverge. What’s obvious to one person isn’t obvious to another. Things fall through gaps.
The first response is usually to work harder. People put in extra hours to cover the gaps. They compensate through effort. This works for a while, but it’s not sustainable. Eventually, someone burns out, or something critical gets missed, or the organisation hits a ceiling it can’t push through.
The second response—the right response—is to acknowledge that the system needs to change.
Structure as relief, not constraint
There’s a persistent myth that structure kills agility. That process makes you slow. That governance is what happens to companies that have stopped caring about moving fast.
This is backwards.
Structure doesn’t kill culture. Confusion does. When people don’t know who’s responsible for what, when decisions take three times as long because nobody’s clear on who can make them, when the same conversations happen repeatedly because nothing’s written down—that’s what kills momentum.
Good structure creates clarity. It tells people what’s expected. It defines who owns what. It removes the overhead of constantly renegotiating how things work. It makes the organisation faster, not slower, because people spend less time navigating ambiguity.
The fear is that adding structure means becoming bureaucratic, corporate, slow. That you’ll lose the thing that made you special in the first place.
But the right structure doesn’t constrain culture. It protects it. It creates space for the work that matters by removing the friction that doesn’t. It lets you scale what works instead of watching it collapse under its own weight.
The external scrutiny inflection point
For many organisations, the wake-up call comes from outside.
A major customer asks questions you can’t easily answer. A partner wants assurance you can’t quickly provide. You’re in a pitch and someone asks about your risk management process and you realise you don’t really have one, or at least not one you can articulate coherently.
The moment external scrutiny changes everything, it’s because “trust me” has stopped being enough. Your customers are bigger. Your contracts are more complex. The stakes are higher. People need evidence, not reassurance.
This isn’t about compliance for its own sake. It’s about credibility. If you want to work with organisations that take risk seriously, you need to demonstrate that you take it seriously too. That means being able to show not just that you care, but that you have systems in place to manage what you care about.
This shift can feel sudden, but it’s usually been building for a while. You’ve been getting by on trust and goodwill. Then one day, that’s not enough anymore. The question is whether you scramble to create evidence retrospectively, or whether you’ve built the foundations that make evidence a natural byproduct of how you work.
Recognising the transition points
Growth doesn’t happen linearly. It happens in stages, and each stage has different requirements.
You might be fine with informal processes until you hit a certain headcount. Then the cognitive load becomes too high and things start breaking. Or you’re fine until you enter a regulated sector and suddenly need to demonstrate controls you’ve never thought about before. Or you’re fine until a major incident reveals gaps you didn’t know existed.
These are transition points. Moments when the way you’ve been working stops being adequate for the reality you’re now operating in.
The skill is recognising them before they become crises. Noticing when decisions are taking longer than they should. When the same issues keep coming up. When people are frustrated but can’t quite articulate why. When you’re turning down opportunities because you’re not confident you can deliver at that scale.
These are signals. Not that you’re failing, but that you’re outgrowing your current operating model.
What proportionate governance actually means
Proportionate governance means building the minimum viable structure that keeps you in control without creating overhead that slows you down.
It’s not about implementing frameworks for their own sake. It’s not about documenting everything. It’s not about becoming process-heavy.
It’s about identifying where lack of clarity is creating friction, and adding just enough structure to remove that friction. It’s about making explicit the things that need to be explicit, while leaving room for the things that still work informally.
For risk decisions, this might mean defining who can make which types of decisions, and what information they need to make them well. For accountability, it might mean being clear about ownership so things don’t fall through gaps. For evidence, it might mean capturing just enough information that you can answer reasonable questions without having to reconstruct everything from memory.
The goal is control without bureaucracy. Clarity without rigidity. Structure that serves the work, not structure that becomes the work.
Making risk decisions visible and traceable without requiring a different way of working is part of this approach—the structure exists to create clarity, not to create overhead.
The identity question
One of the hardest parts of growth is the fear that you’ll stop being yourselves. That adding structure means losing the qualities that made you distinctive.
This fear is real, but it’s usually misplaced. What kills culture isn’t structure—it’s growth without structure. When people are confused, frustrated, working at cross purposes, spending their energy navigating ambiguity instead of doing meaningful work, that’s when culture suffers.
The organisations that maintain their identity through growth are the ones that add structure deliberately. They think about what needs to be formalised and what doesn’t. They preserve space for the things that matter while creating clarity around the things that were causing friction.
You don’t have to become a different organisation. You have to become a version of yourself that works at the scale you’re now operating at. That’s not loss. It’s maturity.
Making the shift
If you’re feeling the friction of growth, the first step is admitting that the old ways aren’t working anymore. Not because they were wrong, but because the context has changed.
The second step is being honest about what’s actually breaking. Where are decisions getting stuck? Where are things falling through gaps? Where is lack of clarity creating overhead?
The third step is adding structure only where it’s needed. Not everywhere. Just where the absence of it is causing real problems.
This doesn’t require a transformation programme. It doesn’t require consultants. It doesn’t require becoming someone you’re not. It requires being honest about where you are, what’s not working, and what minimal changes would make things work better.
Growth is uncomfortable. That discomfort is information. It’s telling you that you’ve reached a scale where your current operating model needs to evolve.
Listen to it. Don’t ignore it. Don’t feel shame about it. And don’t overcorrect by adding more structure than you need.
Most growing organisations don’t fail because they’re reckless. They fail because the ways of working that once felt sensible quietly stop scaling.
Good governance isn’t about becoming corporate. It’s about adding just enough structure to stay in control as complexity increases.
You’re not failing. You’re just at the point where you need more structure than you used to. That’s not a weakness. It’s a stage.
