The Founder’s Trap

Towards the end of the last century, the consulting firm Adizes published a paper entitled The Lifecycle of Growing Organisations adopted from Managing Corporate Lifecycles and The Pursuit of Prime by Dr Ichak Adizes. This posits the idea that just like living organisms, organisations follow a lifecycle. They suggest that “at each new stage of development an organisation is faced with a unique set of challenges. How well or poorly” the organisation is able to navigate these challenges “has a significant impact on the success or failure of (the) organisation”.

In this short article I want to focus on the transition from “Go-Go”, or what may more commonly be called scale-up today, and “Prime”, which is reached through Adolescence.

In a recent in Business Insider article Fred Wilson, a partner at Union Square Ventures, characterises this transition as an “ugly adolescent period”. When, “the bright shiny hopeful optimism” of the start up phase is replaced with “doubts…zits (and) multiple distractions”. At this point organisations can get stuck between the way they are and they need to be to continue to move forwards. This period can feel messy and uncomfortable and as a father of a teenage daughter can often leave one guessing at the best way to support this change.

This can be a particularly troubling period for founders, feeling as it does very different from the halcyon “Go-Go” days, when everything they touched seemed to turn to gold. It is not unusual for founders to feel trapped in the organisations they have built. As what seemed intuitive and agile, now becomes laboured and complicated.

Gianpiero Petriglieri, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, conceptualises “stuckness” as the experience of an impasse which “occur each time we encounter a situation that our current adaptations cannot make sense of or handle meaningfully. The result is a difficulty in experiencing or making sense of experience.” He suggests “looking at the perception of “being stuck” as the manifestation of such an impasse, one that emerges when our cognitive frameworks, emotional capacity, and behavioral repertoire do not allow us to make sense of, be within, and deal with our present intrapsychic or social reality.”

For founders, who have until now appeared infallible, the dawning realisation that they may be fallible is inconvenient, perhaps more so for the broader organisation who in the past has relied on their founders to steer them through the uncertainty which is a feature of starting and scaling organisations.

In the face of this many will turn to new structures, new strategies or seek new investment or similarly try to think and work harder to get through this road block. But many soon discover that these approaches only provide temporary relief and at worse can often reinforce their cages and feelings of stuckness.

It is our contention that such impasses demand a fresh perspective, one that can only be found in considering what may lie “below the surface”. To take Petriglieri’s advice it feels important to consider these impasses less as a regressive condition, a roadblock to be overcome, and more as a progressive state, signalling perhaps the end of an old way of operating and heralding the potential for the emergence of a new beginning.

For founders this means considering what this change will demand of them and what role they must take up in the organisation and sometimes whether this is a role to which they are suited or are willing to take on.

For their leadership team and the organisation there is a need to consider the same, as the organisation starts to transition from one that is held by a few leaders at the top to one that is held by the culture.

In service of this there is then a need for both, founders and their leadership teams, to come together and agree what they may need from each other and how they will work together.

Working in this way individuals are able to re-discover their sense of energy and purpose. They are better able to engage in conversations and activities that strengthen rather than erode their culture.

They are able to get unstuck.