Scaling challenges represent existential moments for mid-market companies, and failing to address them can be fatal to the business. If technology constraints prevent you from meeting market demands, capturing new opportunities, or delivering reliable service to customers, you face a critical inflection point, and your response determines your company’s future relevance and competitiveness. To successfully navigate these moments, you have to first understand that technology-related symptoms are merely the visible manifestation of deeper organizational problems.
“I’ll still be here when you’re gone, so I’m just going to wait you out.”
This thunderbolt left me speechless. It came from the CIO of a 9-figure enterprise company that had brought us in to help them tackle their scaling problems. Just an hour earlier we’d been in a meeting with the CEO and he’d been full of enthusiasm and positivity about the changes we were going to make. Now he was heading back to his team to tell them to ignore everything and to just carry on doing things the way they’d always done them.
In fairness to this CIO, he’d seen multiple change initiatives come, and fail, and go. His was a classic case of change fatigue – very real and possibly justified. But the point I’m trying to illustrate stands: your scaling problems look like technology problems, so you think it’s going to be the technology, the tools, the processes you put in place that determine whether or not your company makes it to the next stage of growth.
In reality, it’s your people, your teams, and your capabilities and capacities as a leader when it comes to guiding them through change.
Technology never fixed anything by itself
You can make eye-watering investments in tech and still be left with a company that lacks digital maturity. I have witnessed first hand global multi-billion dollar technology companies where the release process for new software was governed by emailing a PowerPoint presentation around to people for them to sign off on it. (If you were lucky, it would only take a matter of weeks to get the green light.)
Technology alone will not solve your scaling problems: the tech is an enabler, but it’s people who are the fundamental drivers of success. No matter how shiny the tool, or how cutting edge the new system, there’s no getting away from the fact that business improvement requires significant human involvement.
Effective digital transformation means getting laser focused on the change journey.
Your real bottlenecks are organizational
It’s tempting to point the finger at legacy software and outdated systems when you’re looking for bottlenecks. But the tech is only half the story. Those problems are surmountable. The reason you can’t deal with them effectively is that your organization itself is unfit for scaling up.
You are beset by problems that have a veneer of technology but underneath they’re all based in human behaviour.
Consider these indicators:
- Technical solutions repeatedly fail to deliver expected results
- Simple changes require excessive coordination across multiple teams
- New technology implementations don’t achieve adoption targets
- Different departments have conflicting priorities and understanding of business objectives
- The same problems resurface despite technological “fixes” (and the fixes cause entirely new problems)
- Decision-making processes are unclear or overly complex
If two or more of these indicators sound familiar, your scaling challenges likely have deeper organizational roots that need addressing before, or alongside, any technical solutions.
Here are a few patterns that I frequently see.
People are resistant to change, and unable or unwilling to adopt new systems
Like the CIO I mentioned earlier, people get beaten down by failed change initiatives and this makes them suspicious of any attempts to force them into new patterns. This can affect people at any level in the organisation. If they don’t understand the point of the new systems or tools you’re putting in front of them – and how they will ultimately make their lives easier – they’re unlikely to invest the time and energy required to start using them.
Processes and workflows are ad-hoc and ineffective
Maturity is about being able to repeat the same process and get the same results every time. If it’s repeatable it can be automated. And if it can be automated, it can be scaled. But if your people need to reinvent the wheel every time they face a problem – even when all those problems have a similar shape – you’re doomed to paralysis.
Communication frequently breaks down and collaboration is non-existent
So many transformation initiatives fail because they’re treated like an IT project. Change requires cross-functional collaboration. Transformation is never purely an IT project or a marketing project or a manufacturing project but should involve people from every part of the organisation, communicating with intensity so that everyone is on the same page. When teams are siloed communication is inevitably impaired which leads to duplicated efforts, cross purposes and waste.
Lack of alignment between technology and business goals
An inability to translate high-level business goals into concrete technology strategies and plans points to a fundamental misalignment between what the business needs and what the technologists are capable of delivering. This is the kind of gap you discover when you ask for some seemingly-simple customer-facing innovation (real-time warehouse inventory on the website, to take a real-world example) and the chief technologist comes back with a five-year timeline.
Technical debt is crippling
Technical debt is the accumulated cost of choosing expedient solutions over sustainable ones. It’s not a purely technical problem but reflects organizational priorities, incentives and decision-making processes. If you reward short-term deliverables over long-term sustainability, lack effective product ownership, fail to balance feature development with platform health, or fail to incentivize long-term employees to stay current with the latest technological advances, you’ll end up in a cycle of technical debt that prevents scaling.
Tackle the scaling problem people-first
Radically transforming the way you do business is fundamentally about people and their engagement with technology and change. It means prioritising the human element over the tools themselves. It requires clear and active leadership.
Lead it like you mean it
To overcome organizational entropy, you have to give the system a huge influx of energy.
Executives have to actively participate in and champion any big change initiative. That means clearly communicating the goals and stakes, actively delegating, and consistently following through to ensure the changes become embedded. Without this sustained input of leadership energy, you’ll run out of steam pretty quickly.
It’s imperative that leadership sets the tone. One leader I worked with was very effective at communicating the vision and getting people on board with it: he told his people “these two things. If they don’t get done, you’ll have a new boss next year.” Everybody understood that message loud and clear, and it resulted in a huge amount of focus to get those two things done. It wasn’t plain sailing, but they pulled it off.
Would the same thing have happened if they’d been presented with a long laundry list of things to do?
Manage the resistance and the fear
Big changes inevitably meet with resistance. That’s a natural consequence of destabilising people’s normal routines, relationships and ways of doing things – they suddenly drop down two levels on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as they question whether this is going to affect their job, their career prospects and their status.
The only sensible thing to do is to acknowledge the fear and tackle it head on. Make sure people understand the benefits of the changes. Find out what their concerns are and address them. It’s basic change-management stuff but I see it getting neglected all the time.
We came into a large public edtech company a few years ago where the previous leadership had tried to implement an agile transformation by hiring a consultant and then just leaving them to it. The old processes were removed without effective new ones in place, leading to a complete breakdown. When we got there, one development team hadn’t successfully released even a bug fix in over a year.
Build sustainable foundations: collaboration and communication
People working in silos is a recipe for misfiring change programs – you need the input and collaboration of all affected departments from the outset to ensure alignment and shared ownership.
Assemble cross-functional teams
Break down these silos by putting together cross-functional teams to plan and do the transformation work. By bringing together different areas of expertise and understanding of the business, they’re far better positioned to identify and address root causes – instead of just playing whack-a-mole with the symptoms.
Getting the right team structure in place is crucial. When we do this for clients we try to understand all the different perspectives through interviews and then recommend team compositions that bring together the necessary skills and insights.
Overcommunicate
Communicate way more than you think you need to. Overcommunication gives you the best chance of keeping people and teams aligned, and of reducing the wasted efforts that result from misunderstandings and confusion. A technology team’s ability to manage technical debt is directly tied to how well leadership communicates priorities and makes trade-offs visible.
This is especially important if you’re going to be running old and new systems in parallel. Aim to surprise nobody.
And remember, this doesn’t just apply internally. This also means targeted information sharing with relevant stakeholders to ensure they are aware of and prepared for changes that will affect their work or their interactions with the business. The people on the front lines need to know how customers will be affected.
When we recently helped a large financial institution implement a new method of loan decisioning, we made sure that the people in the branches knew what would be coming down the pipe before we turned it on.
Tech is the enabler, people are drivers of change
Your creaking mainframe and the dwindling number of people who know how to operate it might be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of reasons for your company’s inability to scale, to innovate and to maintain relevance in the marketplace. But overcoming scaling problems almost always requires widespread business transformation, not just swapping out one tech stack for another.
Technology doesn’t solve problems, people do. At the centre of every organisational bottleneck is a person or team of people caught up in an inefficient or mismatched process. They might be resistant to change because of fears for their job security. They might be forced to improvise ad hoc processes for every task because no one’s shown them a better way or given them the right tools. They might be trapped in a silo. They might not know what they’re supposed to be aiming for because no one’s provided a clear roadmap.
Whatever it is, it’s our job as leaders to give them a clear sense of direction and provide what they need to get the job done. We have to put tremendous amounts of energy into the system to overcome the tendency to fall back on what always used to work. We have to build teams that bring together disparate parts of the organisation to effect change. And we have to make sure that everyone, from the board room to the front lines, knows exactly what we’re trying to do, why we’re doing it, and what they need to do to make it a reality.
Having a vision for your business is one thing. Making that vision a reality is another thing altogether. No ‘IT project’ is going to deliver it. Instead, you’re going to have to get tens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of people on board and bring them along for the ride.
Moving forward: from diagnosis to transformation
If these challenges sound familiar, the first step is a thorough assessment of what’s truly inhibiting your ability to scale. At Ten Mile Square, we use a structured assessment process to help uncover the root causes behind scaling issues, separating symptoms from the underlying pathologies.
If you want a solid foundation for your transformation roadmap – one that addresses both the people and technology components of sustainable growth – an objective current state assessment and root-cause analysis is where you start.