The finding
A recurring observation in organisations that have recently expanded — by headcount, by geography, by product line, or by all three — is that governance questions seem to appear faster than anyone can resolve them: who approves what, who is accountable when two teams disagree, which version of a policy applies where. Leadership teams often describe this as a sudden proliferation, as though expansion generated a batch of new problems that did not exist before.
Larry E. Greiner’s research on organisational growth offers a more precise account of what is actually happening. Greiner’s phase model describes growth as a sequence of stable periods, each governed by a dominant practice, followed by a crisis in which that practice stops working and a new one has to be adopted. The crisis is not caused by expansion introducing new problems from outside. It is caused by expansion exposing the limits of a governance approach that was already inadequate for questions the organisation had not yet needed to ask.
In other words, most of the governance questions that “appear” after expansion were latent before it — unasked because the organisation had not yet grown into a shape where they mattered. Expansion does not create them; it removes the conditions under which they could remain comfortably unasked.
How this shows up in practice
Before expansion, a single person or a small group frequently holds enough shared context to resolve ambiguity informally, without anyone needing to articulate a rule. A question about who approves a mid-sized purchase, or how to handle a conflict between two departments, gets settled in a conversation rather than by reference to a written policy — because everyone involved already has enough shared understanding of intent and precedent to reach a workable answer.
Expansion removes that shared context faster than most organisations replace it with explicit rules. New sites, new hires, new layers of management mean that the people now facing a governance question were not present when the informal precedent was set, and have no reliable way to reconstruct it. Every one of these situations, previously resolved without friction, becomes a genuine open question the moment it reaches someone outside the original circle of shared context — and because expansion multiplies the number of such situations simultaneously, the questions appear to arrive all at once rather than one at a time.
Why it happens
The underlying mechanism is that governance structures at smaller scale are frequently implicit rather than explicit — real, functioning, and entirely unwritten. This works as long as the group of people relying on the implicit structure remains small and stable enough that everyone in it absorbed the same unstated rules through repeated exposure. Expansion breaks this in two ways at once: it adds people who were never exposed to the unstated rules, and it adds situations — new markets, new products, new partnerships — that the unstated rules were never designed to cover in the first place.
Greiner’s account of growth phases frames this as an inherent and recurring feature of organisational life rather than a one-off failure: each phase’s dominant practice is well suited to the scale it was built for and increasingly unsuited to the scale that follows, and the transition between phases is where governance questions concentrate.
Where it varies
The volume and character of governance questions after expansion depends heavily on how the expansion happened. Organic headcount growth tends to surface questions gradually, as new joiners individually encounter situations the informal structure never anticipated. Geographic or acquisitive expansion tends to surface them in a concentrated burst, because an entire new population — a new office, a newly acquired company — arrives simultaneously without ever having absorbed the original informal rules at all.
Organisations with some prior experience of formalising governance — even imperfectly — tend to navigate this transition with fewer unresolved questions outstanding at any given time, not because they anticipated the specific questions, but because they already have some habit of converting implicit precedent into explicit rule when the need becomes visible.
The near-term consequence of unaddressed question proliferation is usually a slowdown rather than a crisis: more matters get escalated than the organisation’s current escalation capacity can actually absorb, because nobody has yet been given explicit authority to resolve the new category of question locally. The compounding consequence is subtler. Each unresolved question tends to get answered informally and inconsistently by whoever happens to be asked, which means the organisation accumulates a growing set of de facto precedents that were never deliberately decided and are not consistent with one another — a second, unofficial layer of governance forming underneath the formal one, largely invisible until two of its precedents contradict each other in front of the same audience.
A common misconception is that this proliferation reflects a leadership team failing to anticipate growth. Greiner’s own account suggests the opposite: the practices that later generate a wave of governance questions were often the correct choice at the earlier scale, and no leadership team can fully anticipate every question a future scale will raise before reaching it. The more useful response is not retrospective — treating the proliferation as evidence something should have been foreseen — but forward-looking, building some capacity to notice when a cluster of questions is forming before it becomes large enough to be disruptive.
The same pattern appears across many kinds of organisation; see Other Sectors for how it is read elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- Is a pattern forming — several unrelated-seeming governance questions that share a common root in the same piece of context nobody has yet made explicit?
- Which parts of the organisation’s current functioning depend on shared understanding that has never been written down anywhere?
More on this topic: Governance.
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