How organisations scale
summary
Claims a practical model: three interdependent spaces (delivering/discovering/renewing) and four scale-strands — structuring, translating, reconciling, connecting — that expose concrete dysfunctions and fixes. Examples include a bank that lost $50 billion and the Flight Levels model from Klaus Leopold; tools invoked are Stafford Beer’s viable system model, customer–geography–technology–time segmentation, and a coordinate, cooperate, collaborate decision frame. Advice is tactical: measure customer success before reorganizing, spot missing context, and work right-to-left to close “holes in the whole product.”
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Organizational scaling intro
- 3:35Viable organizations
- 7:29Three delivery spaces
- 12:25Flight Levels scale
- 14:13Pain in structures
- 14:55Dysfunctions in whole product
- 21:40Translating progress
- 24:07Ends vs means
- 25:31Building trust
- 26:13Surprise and self-organization
- 29:42Context in decisions
- 33:40Retrospectives
- 35:25Process relationships
- 37:10Scaling obstacles
- 39:55Closing & Q&A
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