The Unseen Crisis: Why Your Startup's Culture Has a "Best Before Date"

For years, when I’ve mentioned “corporate culture” to management, I’ve often seen eyes glaze over. It felt abstract, intangible, perhaps even a luxury. Working primarily within large, long-standing corporations reinforced an assumption: culture was monolithic, glacial, slow to shift. It was simply the backdrop. My recent deep immersion within the vibrant, chaotic world of start-ups and scale-ups, however, has shattered that illusion and revealed a far more urgent and dynamic reality. Culture isn’t just important for growing businesses; it’s the invisible scaffolding that either enables explosive growth or becomes the silent, structural flaw causing collapse. Crucially, organisational culture has a definitive “best by date.”

At its essence, culture is disarmingly simple, though profoundly complex in its implications. It’s the amalgamation of shared values, beliefs, assumptions, norms, attitudes, behaviours, and practices that define “how things are done around here.” It’s not merely what an organisation achieves, but how it achieves it.

My work, synthesising experiences with diverse start-ups and underpinned by research for my book, How Might We? A Fresh Look at Change Management and Transformation from a Neurodivergent Perspective, has illuminated a critical pattern: the ways of working and the underlying cultural assumptions that fuel a fledgling start-up become obsolete, even dangerous, as the organisation scales. The breaking point isn’t fixed at 50 or 100 employees: it’s elastic, unique to each venture, yet undeniably systemic.

Witnessing Culture Hit Its Expiry Date

Consider a local enterprise I’ve journeyed with for over 6 years. Beginning as three passionate founders in a tiny office, their culture thrived on serendipity. Communication was effortless, they literally bumped into each other constantly. At five, then twelve people, this worked. But growth forced a move to a larger building, then the addition of a separate warehouse nearby.

Suddenly, the effortless corridor chats vanished. Miscommunications mushroomed, impacting core operations like shipping goods. We had to consciously introduce structure, basic processes that felt alien but were suddenly vital. This wasn’t a one-off fix.

Over six years, they’ve navigated three distinct maturity levels, requiring significant adjustments to how they worked, and crucially, two profound shifts in their core beliefs and assumptions about collaboration and communication. They are now grappling with a third evolution, a testament to the ongoing, often painful, necessity of cultural adaptation.

The challenge intensifies with complexity. Another client, an 80-person biotech pioneer, boasted brilliant scientists, a driven sales force, and ambitious management. Yet, paralysis set in. Why? Deeply held, conflicting assumptions. Scientists prioritised pure, rigorous R&D; sales needed market-ready products now; management focused on scaling and investment. These weren’t mere communication gaps; they were fundamental cultural rifts expressed through daily friction and stalled decisions.

Alignment required more than a motivational speech. It demanded restructuring departments, recruiting specific bridging skills into the science team, overhauling executive decision-making processes, and ultimately, a change in CEO leadership to unite these disparate cultural forces under a coherent strategic vision.

Even in a tiny six-person biotech, I observed multiple micro-cultures: R&D versus sales versus management, each operating with distinct, unspoken rules and priorities about what constituted success and how to achieve it. The dissonance was palpable and damaging. It felt like each person was working for a different company.

The Deeper Currents: Beyond Process to Mindset

My experience underscores a vital lesson. Even with a crystal-clear strategy (a rarity in itself) and flawless communication (rarer still), an organisation must align its ways of thinking and doing to achieve its desired outcomes. This is the essence of organisational design: purposefully structuring departments, functions, skills, resources, and processes to support the strategic goal. But culture runs deeper than structure and process. It permeates how we think: the unconscious biases, the ethical compass, the problem-solving approaches which inevitably dictates what we do when nobody is watching.

History’s corporate scandals grimly illustrate this: all the processes in the world cannot compensate for a fundamental lack of integrity within the cultural bedrock. While I haven’t witnessed such extremes in my engagements, I’ve seen countless instances where the wrong mindset, short-termism, siloed thinking, fear of failure, has led directly to wasted resources, squandered opportunities, and substandard products. Culture is the operating system upon which all processes run.

The Relentless Demand of Growth: Evolving or Expiring

Creating a culture focused on achieving outcomes respectfully and aligned with customer, employee, and organisational values should be paramount. But here’s the stark reality for start-ups and scale-ups: this culture is never “done.” Growth is the ultimate disruptor. I’ve witnessed start-ups expand at breakneck speed, their operational velocity far outstripping their cultural capacity to adapt. This lag becomes the critical bottleneck. You simply cannot run a 100-person scale-up with the informal, founder-centric culture of a 10-person start-up. You cannot lead a complex, multi-departmental entity the same way you led a tight-knit founding team.

This necessitates a dual evolution:

Organisational Culture Evolution: The shared assumptions, norms, and behaviours must mature to handle increased complexity, delegation, formalisation, and cross-functional collaboration. What was once efficient (like all decisions going through the founder) becomes a crippling bottleneck.

Leadership Evolution: Leaders must undertake significant inner growth. They must reconceptualise their role, their identity, their very approach to power and decision-making. Some founders possess the capacity to metamorphose into CEOs of larger entities; others find their genius lies in the initial creation and do best by exiting to build anew. As leadership expert Edgar Schein long emphasised, leaders are the ultimate architects and reinforcers of culture; their evolution is inextricably linked to the organisation’s cultural health.

The Invisible, Costly Bottleneck

Why is this cultural adaptation so often neglected, particularly in fast-growth environments?

• • The Velocity Gap: Start-ups often grow faster than the time required for meaningful cultural adaptation and leadership development. Founders are typically laser-focused on product, market fit, and revenue. These are tangible, immediate concerns. Culture feels nebulous and slow.
  • Leadership Metamorphosis is Hard: Evolving one’s leadership identity and capabilities requires deep, often uncomfortable, introspection and learning, “inner work.” It’s easier to focus on the external business challenges.
  • The Perception of Constant Chaos: Rapid growth means hitting new maturity stages quickly, each demanding cultural shifts. It can feel like relentless, destabilising change. Yet, as Larry Greiner’s seminal work on organisational growth phases highlighted, these stages present predictable crises of leadership, autonomy, control, and bureaucracy that must be navigated systemically; they cannot be wished away or hacked.
  • Intangible ROI: The benefits of cultural investment (reduced friction, better decision-making, higher retention, sustained innovation) are often diffuse and long-term. The costs of not investing (misalignment, wasted effort, talent drain, strategic drift) accumulate insidiously but are devastating. Leaders grounded in immediate rewards struggle to prioritise the less visible, longer-term cultural imperative. A 2022 study by MIT Sloan Management Review underscored this, finding that misaligned functional cultures (like the biotech example) were a primary cause of strategic execution failure, though the link was often poorly understood by leadership.

The Imperative: Seeing Culture as Core Infrastructure

For founders and leaders navigating the treacherous waters of scaling, recognising that your culture has a “best by date” is not a soft HR consideration; it’s a fundamental strategic imperative. The informal magic of the early days will expire. The leadership style that ignited the spark will need refinement, or replacement, to fuel the larger engine.

Investing in consciously evolving your culture and your leadership capability isn’t a distraction from building your product or business; it’s the essential work of building the organisation capable of delivering it sustainably. It requires facing the invisible patterns, the conflicting assumptions, and the necessary inner growth. It demands viewing culture not as an abstract concept, but as the dynamic, living infrastructure that determines whether your hard-won growth leads to enduring success or becomes the foundation of your failure. Ignore its expiry date at your peril. The map will change; your culture must be the compass that helps you navigate the new territory.

(Inspired by research and observations underpinning my eBook, How Might We? A Fresh Look at Change Management and Transformation from a Neurodivergent Perspective, exploring how neurodivergent cognition and systems thinking offer vital tools for navigating these complex human and organisational dynamics.)

References:

• Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational Culture and Leadership (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass. (Seminal work on leader’s role in culture)
• Greiner, L. E. (1972). Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow. Harvard Business Review. (Foundational model on growth phases and crises)
• Sull, D., Sull, C., & Zweig, B. (2022). Why Strategy Execution Unravels—and What to Do About It. MIT Sloan Management Review. (Research on misaligned cultures and execution failure)