Scale vs. Speed: Why organizations slow down

Scale vs. Speed: Why organizations slow down

In today's fast-paced world, organizations are constantly striving to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. However, as they grow and scale, they often find that their pace of innovation slows down. This phenomenon can be attributed to a few key factors.

One of the main reasons why organizations slow down as they scale is because their focus shifts from innovation to meeting customer expectations. As an organization grows, it attracts a larger customer base, and these new customers have different priorities. Instead of seeking out the latest and greatest innovation, they want promises kept, reliability, and reasonable prices. They value efficiency and predictability over cutting-edge features.

To meet these changing customer expectations, organizations need to refactor their code from scratch. This means taking a step back and reevaluating their processes and systems to ensure that they are delivering on their promises. By doing so, they can bring predictability to their offering and reach a wider audience. This may require spinning off a cash cow product and assembling a dedicated team to start something new from scratch. While the new venture may not work at first, the experience and persistence gained from trying new things will eventually pay off.

It's important to note that many of the most successful companies today started small with just a handful of full-time employees. Think about Apple, Google, Slack, Instagram, and many others. They were able to maintain their innovative spirit and speed of execution because they were not yet burdened by the complexities that come with scale. As organizations grow, they often become more bureaucratic and slow-moving, hindering their ability to innovate.

Another interesting perspective on the relationship between creativity and productivity comes from Scott H Young. He argues that creativity is productivity, and the more work you produce, the more likely you are to have breakthroughs. Young points out that the most successful authors and researchers often have their highest cited work early in their careers. This challenges the notion that creativity burns out quickly and explains the mediocrity of researchers in their later years.

Research by Liu and coauthors supports this idea, as they found that any paper written at any stage in your career has an equal probability of being your top cited paper. Dean Simonton's analysis of creative output across various domains also suggests that each piece of work a creative individual produces has roughly equal odds of having a significant impact. In other words, the most important determinant of creative success is simply how much work you produce.

To increase your chances of creative success, it's crucial to be at the knowledge frontier. You need to be pushing the boundaries of knowledge in your field to contribute something new and innovative. Idea generation and public reception are stochastic processes, meaning they have a significant random component. Once you reach a certain threshold of knowledge and expertise, further advances become more reliant on chance.

This is where Price's Law comes into play. It states that half of the research in a given discipline will be produced by the square root of the number of researchers. In other words, the most prolific researchers are more likely to produce groundbreaking work. The randomness of creative success favors those who are constantly producing and putting their work out into the world.

In conclusion, organizations often slow down as they scale because their focus shifts from innovation to meeting customer expectations. To counteract this, they need to refactor their code from scratch and start new ventures to keep the spirit of innovation alive. Additionally, creativity and productivity go hand in hand, and the more work you produce, the more likely you are to have breakthroughs. To increase your chances of creative success, be at the knowledge frontier and constantly produce work. Don't be afraid to take swings and embrace the random nature of creative endeavors.

Actionable Advice:

1. Regularly evaluate and refactor your processes and systems to ensure that you are meeting customer expectations and delivering on your promises.
2. Foster a culture of innovation and encourage your team to take risks and try new things. Embrace the idea that failure is a stepping stone towards success.
3. Increase your output and embrace the randomness of creative success. Don't be afraid to put your work out into the world and take more swings.