Every organization has processes for getting work done. Initially, those processes are simple, flexible, and often informal. A small team gets work done through quick conversations and a shared understanding of how to make things happen. Information lives in one or two spreadsheets or documents that everyone knows about, and decisions get made quickly with minimal input from various stakeholders. All of this works swimmingly in an environment characterized by an emerging organization, straightforward work, and manageable challenges.
An interesting shift occurs when organizations start succeeding. The same processes that helped an organization get off the ground become a barrier to further growth. What works for five people does not work for fifty. The informal ways of getting things done that work when the organization is small enough for everyone to know each other become confusing as the organization grows. The organization gets stuck in the web of the very processes that used to be heralded as the best way to do things.
The Signs No One Wants to See
Process overload doesn’t announce itself with a bang. Instead, it sneaks up on an organization in the shape of the increasing frustration, mistakes, and time it takes to do basic tasks. Staff members start saying things were “easier.” They also begin spending a lot of their time coordinating the work instead of doing their jobs. Tasks that took them an hour start taking half a day. Questions with easy answers become research projects over multiple records.
These signs are easily ignored as expected growing pains or busy periods. The organization assumes they only need to work harder or hire another person to handle the expected demand. Unfortunately, adding people to a broken process makes it even more of a mess because it increases complexity without addressing the issues in the underlying structure of the process.
For educational organizations, this point probably sits somewhere in numbers of students or clients. An organization that could successfully coordinate the needs of 50 students per quarter using a few simple spreadsheets, some emails, and goodwill starts to fall apart at 200. Enrollments start falling behind. Tracking attendance starts becoming tricky. Recording the results of assessments gets messy. Issuing certificates takes longer than expected, leaving students fuming. The systems that worked wonders at lower volumes start struggling to cope with the challenges complexity brings.
When It’s Impossible to Be Informal
Informal ways of getting things done and keeping it all in the same head thrives in a small organization, especially in early-stage organizations. By this time, they might have only opened a few months previously, and most staff members are involved in almost everything happening in the organization. Information lives in people’s heads and gets passed down through conversation rather than formal memos.
Growth kills this informality. Newer staff members don’t share the same tribal knowledge founding members usually have after a few months working together in all hands-on-deck capacities. Information that everyone knows only lives in a few people’s heads. When they get busy, sick, or leave the organization, it’s all gone. What seemed like an impressive lack of red tape becomes a total absence of an informal but well-documented process that can be handed down through the staff.
An organization that still relies on informal coordination after it reaches its natural growth stage develops fatal dependencies on specific individuals and informal coordination processes that get derailed when routine activities start interrupting the natural flow.
The Documentation and Systemization Gap
As organizations become more complex, operations also become complex, and complexity requires some form of a documented system to get things done. Informal systems with a few simple rules to guide them thrive in small organizations because there’s not much to remember and not much that needs to get coordinated. Large organizations need structures and documented processes to ensure consistency and quality and that staff members have what they need to start being productive without shadowing them for months.
Educational organizations feel this change more than others. Tracking student progress, maintaining compliance documentation, and providing administrators with reports they can manage all require some form of organization in how they keep records. Informal processes can’t give this to an organization. Training organizations usually reach a point where managing student records requires dedicated student management systems rather than an ad hoc collection of spreadsheets and emails.
The transition from informality to systemization feels like imposing unnecessary bureaucracy on an organization, but it’s necessary bureaucracy that gives the organization a structure it needs to function reliably at scale. It’s no longer a question of if but when an organization should add an element of structure to its operations.
The Hiring Dilemma
An organization can respond to operational problems caused by overloaded processes by simply hiring more people to handle the workload, and sometimes it works, but not always. Hiring more staff works if there’s a proper process already in place that can handle more hands to execute, but it doesn’t work if the process is broken.
The situation only gets worse if an organization overloaded with processes suffering from issues that cause problems for its operations employs these processes when trying to solve their problems. Process complexity is complexity enough. Adding more people to an operational challenge isn’t solving a problem; it’s creating one.
Hiring complexity helps if an organization has decent operational processes that just need more hands to keep going. It doesn’t work if there are no decent processes to begin with.
Creative Messes vs. Productive Messes
All organizations that outgrow their own operational methods experience a tendency towards process overload. Organizations that cope well with the inevitable changes recognize the warning signs and take action to mitigate the situation before it becomes a crisis.
They don’t wait until their tools can’t keep up with the volume of work they ask them to do or their team members have to do; they invest in better tools before the existing tools break down.
They also document central processes as operational complexity increases rather than relying on collective memory from organizational founding members alone. The key is recognizing that what works at one stage of an organization’s life may not work at another stage. The things that get the organization off the ground won’t keep it airborne.
An organization that manages to cope with the outgrowing of their own operational methods not only accepts change but also thrives amidst it. They see process improvement and process upgrades as necessary expenses for continued organizational success rather than a luxury they can afford to avoid.
The processes that helped them get off the ground deserve applause for what they did for the organization’s initial success but also deserve replacement when they’ve reached their limit.
