In a growing business, there is tension between the need for systems to ensure consistent performance and managed agility for ongoing excellence

This is the fight between bureaucracy and creativity. Bigger businesses value bureaucracy, which delivers consistency, while small businesses often prioritise agility, inconsistency and rapid change.

To scale successfully requires both consistency and creativity. Formal systems to manage quality standards across teams, and creative freedom to identify and quickly change track.

If you only have consistency, the business stays stuck on the same track, falling behind the rest of the world as it moves rapidly forward. Alternatively, if you only have creativity without consistent systems, you have agile chaos, where roles are managed by individuals, making the progression and scale impossible.

To transition from early startup to successful growth and scale, your business needs to build both formalised operational systems that keep quality standards consistent, and behavioural processes to encourage you to continually identify new and improved ways of working

Simply put, you need to manage the tension between staying the same and the need to constantly drive up your standards of excellence s, or your quality will erode over time.