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“But you can’t do anything until you know what you’re doing, so you spend some time getting organized. You meet together to get clear on your vision and your purpose. You do some deep dives into why you’re there together.”
“After a while it becomes evident that the work will go more smoothly if you have defined roles, so you figure out who does what. Your new organization begins, and starts to offer what you want to provide the public. Good news! The public likes it. You have created something that is accepted, embraced, and valued.”
“In fact, it’s so well accepted and highly valued that you need to do more of it. You have to scale up—and that means creating systems and processes and finding a way to welcome more people on board so you can get better and bigger at the thing you do. Now there aren’t just you and a couple of friends, there are departments and policies and procedures—and all of this is necessary for you to continue to provide this amazing and highly valued something at the scale that it is desired by others.”
“And then one day something happens. It might start out as something small. But there’s a shift. Instead of everything chugging along with continued external demand and continued internal development, things kind of level off. Then they do more than level off—they actually start to decline.”
“At first you can hardly believe it. The upward trend line is so strong and it continued for so long, surely this is just a temporary blip. Surely in a little bit, things will naturally reverse on their own. You don’t need to do anything different for now—just wait a bit and your life will be back to normal.”
“Except it doesn’t get back to normal. The decline continues. It more than continues, it actually accelerates. By this point it becomes clear that you need to change something. The only problem is, you don’t know what to change. You start trying things, different things, sometimes it seems like anything. (By the way, this is the point in the loop where some organizations just spiral out and die.)”
“And then, as you’re trying all these different things, one of them catches hold. Or maybe a few of them. They start out as small experiments, but they are small experiments that grow out of your existing values. And for some reason—you don’t even know why—now these are the things that resonate. Not the old things that you used to do, but these new things that are kind of like the old things but also somehow different. They are close enough to your core capacities that you can offer them; they are close enough to the desires of the wider public that people want them. And so you begin a whole new process of taking apart the systems and processes that you used to need to be able to do the old thing you used to do, and creating new systems and processes to be able to do the new thing you do.”
“And what you notice is that it feels a whole lot like starting over—even though your organization already exists, you have to now ask the very same questions you asked in the beginning: what are we doing here? What do we need in order to be able to provide what only we can provide? How should we organize ourselves now and what is the core offering that we can make?”
“A healthy organization,” Curt concluded, “will go through this cycle multiple times. The two ends of the loop are where organizations crash and burn. It’s easy to quit when you don’t know what you’re doing. The fun times are when you’re riding the curve up: when you know what you’re doing, people want what you’re doing, and it’s time to expand. The challenging times are in that opposite loop, when you’re rethinking everything you do as you seek a way to provide value today.”
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