Preparing organisations to scale

I have spent most of my career inside organisations that were still early in their maturity, but growing fast. I am drawn to early-stage institutions, at that point where demand suddenly spikes, funding arrives, teams grow, legitimacy expands, and the organisation starts to feel bigger than the shape it was originally designed for. I have loved that about my career so far.

What I enjoy less is working inside well-oiled, heavily process-oriented organisations. Not because processes do not matter, but because by the time they become corporate or bureaucratic, when they can be taken for granted, for me the most interesting work has already happened.

Helping organisations put in place the processes, structures, and decision logic that allow them to grow three to five times in size over a few years is the kind of work I have been fortunate to contribute to. This is not hyperscaler growth, but it is meaningful scale within the span of a decade for each organisation I have worked with. Enough to surface every weakness in how the organisation thinks, decides, and coordinates.

When I reflect on the scalability problems I have seen over the years, I have come to a fairly simple conclusion. Scaling is not really about size. It is about how decisions are made, how responsibility is distributed, and how coordination holds under pressure. In other words, scaling is a governance problem.

I have learned, with many mistakes, that the organisations that scale well are the ones that prepare their internal logic so that when growth happens, it compounds rather than destabilises them. This is hard to get right. I certainly did not have it all figured out at the time, but I learned a lot by watching what held and what didn’t.

Growth multiplies complexity faster than an organisation’s ability to process it operationally. When internal processes are implicit, fragile, or dependent on specific personalities, growth quickly turns into friction. Accountability blurs. Trust in leadership starts to erode.

You cannot stretch early-stage ways of working indefinitely. Even when there is strong inertia from founders, or attachment to legacy habits that once worked. At some point, you have to redesign how people, processes, and systems absorb growth. Otherwise, the organisation starts to break in very real ways.

The Three Pillars of Scale Readiness

Whenever growth got hard, it was always because something was breaking in one of three places: Process, People, and Systems.

1. Process: Make Work Repeatable Before Making It Bigger

Early on, I underestimated how much of the organisation lived in people’s heads. Things “worked” because a few individuals knew who to call, which exception to apply, or how to fix things when they went wrong. That is fine at small scale. But deadly at larger ones. The key question to ask is simple:

Can we explain how things work without pointing to specific people?

If the answer is no, growth will not fix that. It will amplify the confusion.

One of the most common anti-patterns I have seen is trying to scale undocumented, exception-driven processes. You add people, volume increases, and suddenly every edge case becomes someone else’s emergency. A rule of thumb that has held up surprisingly well for me:

If a process requires escalation to function, it is not scalable.

Escalation should be the exception. If it becomes the mechanism, the process itself is broken.

2. People: Alignment Beats Talent

Early growth often works because everyone talks to everyone. Information flows informally, and coordination happens through proximity and trust. As organisations grow, that breaks down. Teams specialise, layers appear, and without intent, silos form by default.

What I have learned is that scaling people is all about aligning effort around a small number of shared goals. When alignment is weak, even very capable teams pull in different directions. Coordination costs rise, and leadership spends more time arbitrating than enabling.

Mentorship plays a critical role here as a way of forming leaders who understand the organisation beyond their own function. People who can translate strategy into decisions, and decisions into action across boundaries.

At scale, accountability also needs to move up a level. It is not enough to know who does the work. What matters is who owns the decision, who needs to be consulted, and who is responsible when trade-offs are made.

When this is done well, coordination improves without adding friction. Teams move faster because they are aligned, not because they are controlled. And leadership becomes less about firefighting and more about creating the conditions for others to lead.

3. Systems: Visibility Enables Coordination

I have come to see systems less as tools to automate work and more as mechanisms to create shared understanding. At scale, coordination rarely fails because people are unwilling to collaborate. It fails because they are acting on different versions of reality.

Good systems make this evident and help resolve it.

Systems are not primarily about control or optimisation. Their real value, especially as organisations grow, is in helping people see what is happening across the organisation so they can make better decisions without everything needing to escalate to the top.

Once that shared visibility exists, systems can start to do something more interesting. With enough structure and reliable data, they can act as an operational mirror, allowing teams to test changes, simulate scenarios, and explore trade-offs before they are imposed on the real organisation.

This is where digital twin thinking becomes useful as a governance capability. When systems allow leaders and teams to sandbox decisions, model growth scenarios, or visualise the impact of different choices, coordination improves dramatically. Conversations shift from opinion to evidence. Risk becomes something that can be managed, not just mitigated.

When systems are designed for control, they tend to centralise power and slow things down. Teams wait for approvals, dashboards become performative, and leadership ends up micromanaging through tools.

When systems are designed for visibility and learning, the opposite happens. Information flows, trust increases, and coordination improves because people can see how their work connects to others and to the organisation’s strategic goals.

Scaling, Revisited

Capital, demand, hype, automation, and now AI all act as growth multipliers. When processes are clear, people are aligned, and systems create shared understanding, growth works in your favour. When they are not, growth quickly institutionalises confusion and exposes weak decision-making.

I have learned this the hard way. You need to clarify how work actually flows, and where knowledge and responsibility sit, before buying sophisticated systems. Automating a process you do not yet understand, or that still depends on institutional memory living in people’s heads, does not create scale. Rather than acting as a shortcut, it tends to add complexity and operational burden, making coordination harder rather than easier.

What consistently works is recognising that readiness is not built by throwing money at growth, but by doing the harder work of thinking things through. Readiness comes from alignment, design, and deliberate choices, often made in rooms full of whiteboards rather than through procurement processes. It means clarifying priorities, decision rights, and failure modes before scale makes them expensive.

What consistently breaks is also predictable. Centralised decision-making that cannot keep up with scale. Informal authority structures that depend on memory and proximity. Knowledge that lives in people rather than in processes and systems.

This is why I increasingly think of scalability as a governance problem.

When process, people, and systems are designed with this agility and clarity in mind, organisations gain the ability to grow without losing coherence. To absorb change without breaking. And to turn success into something sustainable.

That, in my experience, is what scaling well really looks like.