There’s a persistent belief that structure and culture are opposed. That adding process means losing agility. That governance is what happens when you stop being a startup and become the kind of organisation people complain about on LinkedIn.
This belief is wrong. And it’s costly.
The organisations that lose their culture during growth aren’t the ones that add structure. They’re the ones that resist structure until confusion, frustration, and inefficiency have already eroded what made them special.
Good structure doesn’t kill culture. It protects it. It removes the friction that comes from ambiguity and creates space for the work that matters.
Where the fear comes from
The fear of structure is understandable. Everyone’s seen organisations where process has become the work. Where getting approval takes longer than doing the thing. Where bureaucracy exists to justify bureaucracy, disconnected from any useful outcome.
If that’s what structure means, then yes—it should be avoided.
But that’s not what structure means. That’s what bad structure looks like. The kind that’s been implemented without thought, copied from somewhere else, or accumulated over time without anyone asking whether it’s still serving a purpose.
Good structure is different. It exists to clarify, not to constrain. To make things easier, not harder. To remove overhead, not create it.
The fear comes from conflating all structure with bad structure. From assuming that any formalisation is the first step toward becoming the kind of organisation you started your company to avoid being.
What actually kills culture
Culture dies when people are confused, frustrated, and spending their energy on things that don’t matter.
When nobody’s clear who can make decisions, so decisions take weeks of back-and-forth. When ownership is ambiguous, so work falls through gaps or gets duplicated. When the same conversations happen repeatedly because nothing’s written down and everyone has a slightly different memory of what was agreed.
This is what kills momentum. This is what makes people cynical. This is what drives the best people to leave.
It’s not the presence of structure. It’s the absence of it. As covered in Growing up without losing your mind, people spend their time navigating ambiguity instead of doing meaningful work. They get frustrated not because there are too many rules, but because there aren’t enough clear agreements about how things work.
What you’re mourning isn’t culture—it’s simplicity. And simplicity doesn’t scale.
The right structure creates space
When structure is done well, it’s invisible. It removes questions that don’t need to be asked. It clarifies boundaries so people can operate confidently within them. It makes the organisation faster because people spend less time figuring out how things work.
Good structure answers questions like:
Who can make this type of decision without escalating?
What information do we need to capture, and where does it live?
When we disagree, how do we resolve it?
These aren’t constraints. They’re agreements. They remove the overhead of constant renegotiation. They let people focus on the work instead of on navigating the organisation.
The culture you’re trying to protect—speed, autonomy, trust—doesn’t come from having no structure. It comes from having the right structure. Structure that serves the work instead of getting in its way.
Autonomy requires clarity
One of the paradoxes of growth is that autonomy requires structure. When everything’s implicit, people can’t act autonomously because they don’t know where the boundaries are.
If it’s not clear who can make which decisions, people escalate things they should be handling themselves, or they make decisions they shouldn’t be making and create conflict. Neither is autonomy. Both are confusion.
Autonomy means being clear about what you own, what authority you have, and what constraints you’re operating within. Inside those boundaries, you can move fast and make calls. Outside them, you need to coordinate.
This only works if the boundaries are explicit. If they’re implicit, everyone has a different mental model, and autonomy becomes chaos.
Good structure defines those boundaries clearly. It tells people what they’re empowered to do, what they need to coordinate on, and what needs escalation. It creates genuine autonomy instead of the illusion of it.
Process vs. bureaucracy
There’s a difference between process and bureaucracy, and it matters.
Process exists to ensure quality, consistency, or coordination. It serves the work. It makes things more reliable, safer, or more efficient.
Bureaucracy exists to justify itself. It’s process that’s lost connection to outcomes. Steps that nobody can explain. Approvals that add no value. Documentation for its own sake.
The slide from process to bureaucracy happens when nobody’s asking whether the structure still serves a purpose. When it becomes easier to add steps than to remove them. When the focus shifts from “does this help us do better work” to “is this how it’s always been done.”
Avoiding bureaucracy doesn’t mean avoiding all process. It means being deliberate about what structure you add, why it exists, and whether it’s still needed.
Every piece of structure should have a clear purpose. If you can’t articulate why it exists and what problem it solves, it probably shouldn’t exist.
The transition discomfort
Adding structure feels uncomfortable, especially if you’ve been operating informally for a long time. It feels like you’re admitting that the old way wasn’t good enough. It feels like you’re becoming the kind of organisation you didn’t want to be.
This discomfort is normal. It’s also temporary.
What you’re actually doing is acknowledging that you’ve reached a scale where informal doesn’t work anymore. The old way wasn’t wrong—it was appropriate for the size you were. The new way isn’t worse—it’s appropriate for the size you are now.
The discomfort comes from the transition, not from the destination. Once the structure is in place and people see that it makes things easier rather than harder, the discomfort fades.
But if you resist the transition because it feels uncomfortable, the confusion and friction will get worse. People will spend increasing amounts of energy navigating ambiguity. The organisation will slow down. And the culture you’re trying to protect will erode anyway.
What protection actually looks like
Protecting culture through growth means being intentional about what stays informal and what needs structure.
Some things should stay loose. Creativity thrives on unstructured time. Innovation requires space to experiment. Relationships benefit from informal interaction.
Some things need clarity. Decision-making needs explicit authority. Ownership needs to be unambiguous. Critical processes need to be reliable.
The skill is knowing which is which, and adding structure only where the absence of it is creating problems.
The culture you want to protect needs the right foundations. Without them, it collapses under its own weight.
Moving forward
If you’re resisting structure because you’re afraid of losing culture, ask yourself: what’s actually under threat?
Is it the informality you’re attached to, even though it’s creating friction?
Or is it the speed, autonomy, and trust that made you distinctive—qualities that are already eroding because of confusion, not because of structure?
Good structure preserves what matters by removing what doesn’t. It protects culture by making the organisation functional at scale.
You don’t have to become corporate. You have to become clear. That’s not loss. It’s growth.
The right structure protects culture instead of smothering it.
