Why Good Organizations Slowly Become Harder to Work In

By Samuel Roy

The meeting had been productive.

Leaders had spent the better part of the morning reviewing a proposal designed to improve coordination across the organization. The discussion was thoughtful. Different perspectives had been considered. Potential risks had been examined carefully. By the time the meeting concluded, there was broad agreement that the changes would strengthen collaboration and improve decision-making.

The proposal was approved.

No one in the room intended to make work more complicated.

Quite the opposite.

The objective was to remove uncertainty, improve visibility, and help people work together more effectively. The changes were introduced with genuine care and for entirely understandable reasons.

Months later, another initiative introduced additional reporting requirements to support better oversight. A separate challenge led to a new approval process in another part of the organization. A committee was established to improve coordination across functions. New documentation requirements emerged to improve consistency and reduce risk.

Individually, each decision made sense.

Collectively, something else began to happen.

Projects that once seemed relatively straightforward required more coordination than before. Managers found themselves spending increasing amounts of time clarifying priorities and translating expectations. Employees became accustomed to navigating multiple conversations before decisions could move forward. Meetings generated follow-up meetings. Work continued to progress, but often with more effort than anyone would have expected.

From the outside, very little appeared wrong.

The organization continued delivering results. Dedicated people continued working hard. Leadership remained deeply committed to its mission and continued investing significant energy in making the organization better.

And yet, beneath the surface, a quieter reality was beginning to emerge.

Complexity Rarely Arrives All at Once

Organizations seldom become difficult places to work because of a single poor decision.

More often, they evolve through a long series of thoughtful decisions made by capable people attempting to solve legitimate problems. Each additional process, coordination mechanism, reporting requirement, or approval step appears reasonable in isolation. None seems significant enough to fundamentally alter the character of the organization.

The accumulation, however, tells a different story.

Like small deposits settling quietly at the bottom of a river, complexity often builds gradually enough that few people notice it while it is happening. Employees adapt as they go. Managers adjust. Teams develop informal ways of navigating the system. The organization continues functioning, and because no single change appears dramatic, the broader pattern often escapes attention.

By the time people begin describing the organization as bureaucratic or unnecessarily complicated, they are usually describing the cumulative effect of years of individually reasonable decisions.

The Cost of Adaptation

One of the remarkable characteristics of capable people is their ability to adapt.

When systems become more complicated, they compensate. They create informal workarounds. They build relationships that help navigate approvals. They schedule conversations before meetings because experience has taught them that important decisions rarely happen during the meeting itself. They maintain personal spreadsheets alongside official systems. They quietly absorb friction that was never intentionally designed into the organization.

These adaptations are often interpreted as signs of resilience.

In many cases, they are.

They may also be signals that the organization is becoming harder to navigate than it needs to be.

Over time, the effort required simply to move work forward begins consuming energy that could otherwise be directed toward serving clients, supporting colleagues, solving problems, or advancing the organization's mission.

The mission itself has not changed.

The people have not become less committed.

The environment in which they are trying to succeed has simply become more demanding.

The Weight That Cannot Be Seen

Unlike financial costs or performance indicators, organizational complexity rarely appears on a dashboard.

Its effects are experienced rather than measured.

It appears in the additional conversation required before making a decision. In the hesitation created by unclear ownership. In the project delayed because responsibilities overlap. In the meeting that exists primarily because trust has become less certain than it once was.

It appears in managers who spend increasing amounts of time coordinating rather than leading.

It appears in employees who finish each day exhausted despite feeling they accomplished less than they had hoped.

Most of all, it appears in the growing sense that progress requires more effort than it should.

A Quiet Leadership Responsibility

Complexity cannot be eliminated entirely.

Growing organizations require governance. Public institutions require accountability. Risk must be managed thoughtfully, and systems inevitably become more sophisticated as organizations evolve.

The objective is not simplicity for its own sake.

The objective is ensuring that complexity remains proportional to the mission it exists to support.

That requires a particular kind of leadership discipline: the willingness to periodically step back and ask whether yesterday's sensible solutions have quietly become today's unnecessary friction.

Because organizations rarely become harder to work in through dramatic failures.

More often, they become harder to work in one reasonable decision at a time.

Samuel Roy is the founder of Noreki and the author of The Coherence Gap™: Closing the Distance Between Aspiration and Experience. His work focuses on helping leaders build organizations where purpose, strategy, leadership, operations, culture, and human energy reinforce one another.