There's a moment many growing organisations reach without noticing.
In the early days, communication takes care of itself. Everyone knows everyone. If you need something, you tap your neighbour on the shoulder. Decisions travel across the room before anyone writes them down. People share a sense of what the organisation is, what it values and why they're there. It's rarely written down, but everyone knows it.
Then the organisation grows. New teams form, new layers of leadership arrive, and people join in different cities and time zones. Somewhere along the way, often around the point where the founders can no longer be part of every conversation, something shifts.
When organisations grow, the story people thought they belonged to can change.
I've seen this pattern from inside two organisations of around 2,000 people: a telecommunications company, and an owner-operated travel business where I led internal and external communications. I've seen it in a global non-profit, and in my consulting work since, often with membership-based organisations and standards bodies. These can be complex situations, and the details differ. The pattern is remarkably consistent, and so is one thing in particular: what happens inside is mirrored outside.
The first signs
It rarely announces itself as a crisis. It shows up in small ways.
Messages land differently in different teams. One group has information another doesn't. Some people receive too much, others not enough. People start to feel out of the loop, and they fill the gaps with assumptions, which are not always correct.
Human nature doesn't help. When we don't know someone, we're more likely to assume the worst about their intentions, even when those intentions are good. Colleagues who once felt like neighbours start to feel like "the other". Silos form, not because anyone designed them, but because the connections that used to hold people together have quietly thinned.
What's really being lost
When people in growing organisations talk about what they're losing, they rarely talk about processes. They talk about feelings: togetherness, being in it together, the freedom to try things and fail.
That matters, because it tells you what the original story was really made of. It wasn't the office or the size of the team. It was a sense of belonging, and a shared belief about how things are done here.
People want to feel they belong to something. They want to know that their work, however close or far it sits from the main goal, is one piece of a larger picture. When growth blurs that picture, it isn't only communication that suffers. It's people's sense of where they fit.
Why it shows on the outside
It's tempting to treat all of this as an internal matter. It rarely stays one.
When the story fragments inside an organisation, it shows up externally too, in messaging that feels disconnected, conflicting or hard to believe. Different teams describe the organisation in different ways. What customers, members or partners hear in one conversation doesn't match the next. The brand says one thing, and the experience of dealing with the organisation says another.
People outside can usually sense when an organisation isn't telling itself a coherent story, even if they can't say exactly what's wrong. A story that doesn't make sense inside rarely holds up outside.
What leaders assume has landed
One of the most common assumptions I see is that information shared is information understood.
In a small organisation, email works well. It works because it sits on top of everything else: conversations, shared context, people who know each other. As the organisation grows, email becomes the default for everything, but everything that used to surround it falls away. The channel hasn't changed. The relationships that made it work have.
So messages go out and people don't read them, or read them differently. Leaders believe they've communicated because they've announced something. Meanwhile, teams are working from different interpretations of the same message.
This isn't unusual. In a study of 124 organisations by researchers at MIT Sloan, executives and middle managers responsible for carrying out strategy were asked to list their company's top strategic priorities. Only 28% could correctly name three of them. In other words, most of the people expected to deliver the strategy couldn't say what it was. If that's true of them, it's worth asking what everyone else has understood.
Keep the meaning, change the mechanism
The instinct is often to try to hold on to the past: to recreate the early days, or to patch things up and keep moving. Neither works.
What helps is separating two things: the meaning of the original story and the mechanism that carried it.
The meaning is usually worth keeping. The togetherness, the curiosity, the freedom to experiment and learn from failure: these are often the very things that made the organisation successful in the first place.
The mechanism is what has to change. Closeness no longer happens on its own because people sit near each other. Shared understanding no longer spreads through the room. Both now have to be built deliberately.
In practice, that tends to mean three things.
Looking honestly at how information flows. Growing organisations often keep operating within a framework designed for a much smaller team. It's worth asking what people actually need, where they expect to find it, and how important messages are reinforced rather than contradicted. But tools don't solve problems. People do.
Equipping leaders to translate. As new layers of leadership arrive, every leader becomes a channel. Do they have the information they need? Do they understand the decisions behind it? Are they equipped to explain what it means for their team? Written communication alone can't carry this, especially across locations.
Bringing people's versions of the story together. In more than one organisation I've worked in and with, we've brought together a small group of longer-serving and newer colleagues to talk about the culture. Their versions of it are often quite different. Rather than choosing one, we look for the common ground: what everyone recognises as true, and what is worth carrying forward. That becomes the basis for shared values people can actually see themselves in, inside the organisation and in how it presents itself to the world.
What changes when it works
This work isn't a quick fix, and leaders who approach it as one are often disappointed. It works when the whole leadership team is aligned on the key decisions and messages, and uses every opportunity to reinforce them.
It also depends on something simpler: doing what you say. A gap between what leaders communicate and how they act is one of the fastest ways to lose trust. No amount of careful messaging can make up for it.
When it goes well, the first thing you notice is often a feeling, a sense of cohesion that's hard to put your finger on. The practical effects follow. People have a clearer understanding of priorities and how their work connects to them. Teams work from the same understanding rather than different interpretations of the same message. Decisions are made with less ambiguity. Periods of change become easier to navigate, because people understand what's happening and why. Less time goes into chasing information and correcting misunderstandings, and more into the work that matters. And the organisation starts to sound like itself again, to its own people and to everyone else.
At its simplest
Growth doesn't have to mean losing what made an organisation special. But it does mean that the story can no longer look after itself.
People need to know what's happening, why it matters and where they fit within it. When they do, they don't just do better work. They feel part of something worth building.
If your organisation is growing and the story feels harder to hold together, I'd be glad to talk. Start a conversation.
Related: Why Alignment Breaks Down (And How To Rebuild It) · Narrative & Messaging · When The Story Inside Doesn’t Match The One Outside
Written by Carly Morris, founder of Arc Narratives.
