Growth has long been the drumbeat of the successful company. Boards are always in favor of it, shareholders always want more of it and chief executives are paid to deliver it to earn the millions that they feel they deserve and to justify the huge sums that their shareholders have committed to them and to confirm their judgment of their abilities and competence. And the rationale has generally seemed justified. There have been a plenty of businesses for companies to expand into, an abundance of low-cost debt and equities to support that expansion and, even when things have not quite worked out as planned, there has been always plenty of time to get things right before any damage was done.
In 2026, that sequencing has become increasingly dangerous.
Growth is no longer the just reward for the many hours and personal sacrifices that great leaders endure. Instead, it has become a wicked challenge to the design of our organizations and systems. With the demand for growth being far greater than our organizations’ ability to deal with increasing complexity, growth has become a force of negative effect. Our companies have more revenue yet ever decreasing margins, we have more staff yet accountability decreases, we are busier than ever yet apparently doing less.
As we look ahead to 2026, the sustainable growth challenges will not be commercial. Rather, they will be structural. A company that fails to review its decision-making, ownership and operational structures before attempting to grow it out of its current limitations is almost guaranteed to run into obstacles that will be hard to eradicate and therefore costly.
This all changed when the error-absorbing capacity of growth which had previously compensated for managerial errors was removed. Capital markets are demanding more than ever. Customers are more demanding in terms of product quality and are less willing to accept functional shortcomings. The speed of competitive response has also accelerated. Higher complexity in operations is generated directly from higher volumes, while the efficiency of value creation relative to sales revenues is only generated with a certain time lag.
As an organization grows it tends to become increasingly inefficient, and the very process of growth itself exacerbates existing weaknesses. What had proved effective for the smaller organization suddenly becomes a bottleneck as the organization increases in size, personnel or scope of operations. Ad-hoc networking and communication practices that had sufficed when the senior leadership team was a tight-knit group also prove inadequate. What had previously been effective top-down management through personal networks and individual judgments were no longer appropriate.
Companies are often surprised by how quickly their business model changes over time. It’s easy to miss these changes because early warning signs are masked by signs of continued success such as ongoing growth, a robust product roadmap, increasing revenue and strong customer validation. As a company’s business model evolves, so too does the way it operates. Teams may start to work more efficiently but in unfamiliar ways. Execution reliability starts to deteriorate.
In 2026, unmanaged growth is no longer neutral. It is destabilizing.
Most growth failures are not a result of demand. They are a result of bad sequencing.
Some projects begin with a sales ramp for a new product, before product deliverables are fully defined, an international launch before local compliance is addressed, or a new VP role with no clear accountabilities defined. Other projects are layered on top of existing work without stopping to reflect on previous agreements and what is truly needed vs. what can be deprioritized.
The underlying cause is additive growth with structural overload. The system capacity becomes the constraint, and leaders fail to adjust the pace of work. We see increased variability between planned and actual performance as higher level leaders become more engaged and the trust in the system is lost.
In a finite world of capacity, increased complexity leads to increased vulnerability or fragility and therefore sequencing matters.
Revenue growth can mask problems in execution for a long time. Backlogs, long sales cycles and lengthy terms can obscure the impact of operational problems on near-term results. Commonly, executives assume that growing the top line is proof that their efforts to stimulate growth are succeeding.
This interpretation is often misleading.
As growth accelerates, problems multiply and can quickly become unmanageable. Customer experience declines. Margins erode due to increasing levels of operational complexity and inefficiency, and teams work harder to mitigate symptoms of poor systems. Teams experience higher levels of heroism, relying on individuals to ‘save the day’ to overcome systemic challenges and insufficient automated controls.
By the time a company’s revenues start to slow or fall, there can be so much execution debt built up that paying it down will be a long and expensive process. Boards that focus solely on revenue growth will inevitably react too late.
Commercial execution is already characterized by a multitude of challenges, which are popularly referred to as the “Sales Bottleneck”. However, commercial execution also must master a multitude of new challenges that arise from the growth law of expansion. The sales process becomes more complex, customer segments become more heterogeneous and the handovers between sales, implementation and service increase.
Without commercial execution for scalable business models, friction in business will increase. Pricing discipline will erode. The sales cycle will lengthen as sales teams are not prepared to do the heavy lifting necessary to close business or honor the commitments made to acquire a customer, and customer satisfaction will quietly begin to decline.
Scaling pain is a term we have come to know well at Work & Process. Growing pains are not really growing pains either. They are the symptoms of treating commercial operations as a dynamic system that adapts to changes in size and scope.
Growth does not create execution problems. It exposes them.
Operational debt is the consequence of leaving unaddressed the implications of choosing not to decide in the operation of a system at any given time. The sum of all the workarounds, the hacks, the lack of accountability for anything done in the operation of the system. The things that are done to keep the system running forward.
As growth occurs, the debt owed to fixing problems grows as well because the problems that need to be fixed become more costly. Reducing the debt of a small broken process is a relatively low-cost effort. Reducing the debt on the same process after growth has increased the size of the process is a much higher cost.
The reality is that operational debt doesn’t show up on a balance sheet, so boards often aren’t aware of it. Operational debt is a symptom of decreased visibility, increased leadership stress and decreased trust from stakeholders.
By 2026, the toll that IT operational debt exacts on business productivity and the ability to expand and innovate will become glaringly apparent.
All the companies we’ve looked at have stabilized themselves before they scaled. To stabilize a business is to have the right set of decision rights, to have the right processes in place to handle the frequency of the decisions that need to be made, to have high levels of productivity and predictability, and to have the right information in the right place at the right time.
This does not mean that we must slow down our development. Rather, it means that our ability to manage increasing complexity must be ensured in a way that our productivity is not negatively affected.
The rule is to stabilize before one accelerates. Accelerating before achieving stability eliminates one’s options. Attempting to grow without first providing stability will lead to being in a defensive mode, where adjustments are more expensive and less effective.
Boards play a critical role in shaping growth outcomes, often unintentionally.
If a bonus board decides to pay bonuses for revenue growth without thinking through the feasibility of this growth, it has adopted an unstable bonus system. If key performance targets are set for bonuses without assessing the relative importance of each target, the board is likely to give more weight to growth and less to cuts. If the board in addition decides to accept fluctuations in the business to achieve the target of high revenue, stability will be further down-prioritized relative to ambition.
by 2026, boards will have to consider not only the speed at which their business is growing but also its reliability. Growth and risk governance will be inextricably linked.
The characteristics of non-fracturing organizations that are growing are well in plain sight. Very few organizations are attempting to grow in multiple ways at the same time. Very few are designing new business models from the ground up to accommodate the dramatically different demands of a much larger organization. Very few are building the structures, processes and underlying systems that will enable them to deliver on their bold new ambitions before they are needed. Very few are designing compensation structures that align with the realities of an organization that needs to sustain a certain level of output and revenue to meet its obligations.
These organizations do not sacrifice ambition. They channel it through structure.
It's now time to start thinking about the operations you'll need in place to support your future scale, and we recommend that all companies looking to scale in 2026 start thinking about these issues today. Roles, decision-making processes, operational and commercial incentives, and cadence of reviews are a few to start thinking about.
All future growth is built upon clear communication. All future growth is built upon ambiguity.
In 2026, growth is no longer an unqualified good. Rather, it has become a leadership discipline, a governance metric and an operations strategy that will separate winners from losers.
Only those organizations led by Boards and CEOs who see growth as a sustainable and structurally supported process will create long-term value for their stakeholders. Those that pursue momentum at the cost of structural capacity will experience growth as disorder rather than opportunity.
Growth does not fail because ambition is misplaced.
It fails because structure is unprepared.
International Executive Consulting works with boards and CEOs in developing an optimal growth strategy that is delivered with full execution integrity, margin preservation and leadership credibility. Stabilize your operations, plan and execute growth initiatives in a way that does not compromise your ability to run your core business, and in the same time grow your top line in a controlled and sustainable manner.
Author: Cyril Moreau
At International Executive Consulting, we excel in driving business transformation and organizational change - enhancing corporate performance while optimizing efficiency.