Is transforming your organization a sign of failure?
If the old method doesn't work anymore, does that mean we did something wrong?
I've supported 4 transformations of French scale-ups between €5M and €15M over the past 24 months. Here are 3 observations that put it all in context:
1/ Dunbar's thresholds are unavoidable. The first one is brutal.
Around 30 to 50 people, informal coordination stops working. You no longer know everyone, founders have to shift from "scaling the business" to "scaling the organization," and teams have to become autonomous.
Every growing company crosses this threshold. The only question: intentionally, or by accident?
2/ "Founder mode" is a strength that quickly turns into a weakness.
As long as founders can decide almost everything, it works. It's actually impressive how long it can hold. But by 30, 40 or 50 people, two things break: founders can no longer decide everything, and — without competent middle leadership, or a coach 😉 — teams don't magically become autonomous.
It's not a flaw. It's the consequence of a shift in how collaboration works.
3/ AI 10x's the individual before the organization.
Every team, if not every individual, uses their own tools, their own conventions, their own agents; the gains stop at the handoffs between teams. Without shared conventions and coordination across teams, individual performance doesn't add up to collective performance.
An organization is a system of dependencies that can only move as fast as its slowest link.
The good news is that to cross these thresholds, there's a playbook. Principles to teach, rituals to install, skills to build. À la carte — you take what you need, no useless processes, no unnecessary tools.
Transforming your organization isn't a sign of failure. It's one of the keys to a successful scale-up. The sign that you saw the threshold coming, and chose to cross it deliberately rather than be hit by it.
The business has to catch up with the market. The organization has to catch up with itself — and with AI.