Growth before the org chart: expansion without structure

A company is making money. It has people everyone knows by name, its own vocabulary, its own running jokes. It has no org chart. No boxes, no job descriptions, no written hierarchy. Ask who reports to whom and you get a pause, then a story about how things actually work in practice.

This reads like an oversight that someone will get around to fixing. It is a stage. Almost every living organisation passes through it before a skeleton appears, and what happens here decides how well that skeleton will fit when it finally arrives.

Growth starts when the group stops fitting its old volume

The trigger for expansion is arithmetic rather than ambition. Once the positive feedback inside a group outweighs the negative feedback, the group starts to grow. Nobody signs a decision to expand. The group physically stops fitting into the volume it had, and it spills over: more clients, more tasks, more people who joined because there was work to hand them.

What is absent at this point is structure. What is present is a hybrid of culture, information and internal politics, a fusion that works as an adaptation to one specific niche: these market conditions, these people, this moment, with no single document describing any of it.

The speed and the shape of expansion depend on what kind of group this was at the start, informational, functional or procedural, and on the scale of the situation it lives in. A micro-situation, a small market, a narrow niche, a local task, produces fast, almost explosive dynamics: everything is visible, everything is close, the response comes back within the week. A macro-situation, a large market with long chains and delayed effects, produces slow dynamics, where nothing appears to move for weeks and then the growth shows up all at once.

Negative feedback at this stage is a mechanism rather than an enemy. It obstructs, and it also specialises. An argument about who decides on clients and who decides on the product looks like pure friction. That friction is where the division of roles is born, the division that later becomes the structure. Without negative feedback, specialisation happens more slowly and stays blurrier for longer.

Culture sets here, and strategy has not been born yet

This is the most underrated part of the whole sequence. The style of a corporate culture is set at this stage, in implied rituals, formal ones and informal ones, that nobody has ever stated out loud. Not at a strategy offsite. Not in a values deck. In how people started greeting each other in the morning, in what happens to the person who makes a mistake, in who speaks first at a shared meeting and who stays quiet until asked.

Self-organisation at this stage genuinely outweighs management. There is not much to manage yet: no formal structure exists to issue instructions through. There is a network of people who agree among themselves about who does what.

Which makes the line about culture eating strategy for breakfast literal rather than figurative. The point is not that culture beats strategy in some abstract contest of values. The point is that at this stage strategy does not physically exist. It arrives later, together with structure. Culture is already here, already operating, already forming habits that will be very hard to rewrite from above afterwards.

Roles get assigned without anyone assigning them

Picture a small team making a product for a narrow professional market. Clients accumulate, tasks accumulate, people join one after another, and nobody has handed out titles. It simply worked out that one person is always first to answer urgent client questions, and gradually everyone, including new hires, starts routing anything urgent to that person by default. Someone else always suggests slowing down to talk through the risks before a large decision, and their opinion gradually turns into a mandatory approval step, although nothing anywhere says so.

That is expansion without structure: roles distributed, rituals settled, and on paper still a flat team with no hierarchy. When the company grows further and a structure finally appears officially, it will largely ratify what already took shape at this stage. An attempt to build a structure against the culture that already formed almost always meets a dull, unarguable resistance that nobody will explain to you directly.

What a head office ships into this stage without noticing

For a company selling into Russia from somewhere else, this stage is usually invisible, because it happens in a place the head office does not look at: the first two or three local hires, the agency, the distributor, the freelance media buyer who answers fastest in the chat.

Western entry practice tends to assume the opposite order. You define the role, write the job description, slot the hire into a global reporting line, and structure precedes the work. That sequence holds when the receiving environment is large enough to absorb a new box. A Russian operation at the start is rarely that. It is a handful of people plus contractors, and the real order forms out of who answers first, who gets copied in, who ends up being consulted before a decision is committed.

There is a difference in how knowledge travels here as well, and it makes the informal layer denser than in a Google-centred market. Practice built around Google grew on self-serve English documentation and a large indexed community, so an operational question has a written answer somewhere and a new person can be plugged into a defined slot. Practice around Yandex leans on an assigned manager and on knowledge that moves between people, in calls and in professional chats, much of it in Russian first. The consequence for structure is direct: the person holding that knowledge becomes an assembly point faster, and the informal role built around them is heavier and harder to replace than its equivalent at home. That is one of the reasons market entry work has to describe the local operating arrangement as well as the channel plan.

Then there is the question of scale, which decides how fast all of this happens. A foreign company entering a narrow professional niche in Russia is in a micro-situation: the buyers are countable, feedback returns within weeks, and the local roles set inside a quarter or two. A company entering a broad consumer market is in a macro-situation, where the response is delayed and the head office can spend half a year believing that nothing is happening while the roles and the rituals quietly finish forming with no supervision at all.

And there is the most common version of all: no local team exists. Sales go through a distributor, marketing through an agency, and the expansion stage runs between companies rather than inside one, which means nobody owns it. The rituals form anyway. They form in the shared chat, in who is copied on what, in whether the agency media buyer writes to your brand manager or straight to your country lead, in whether a decision counts once it is said on a call or only once it appears in writing. Nobody designed that arrangement, and it will be the actual operating structure of your Russian presence for the next couple of years.

Do not rush to impose a structure

If you are watching a growing company, your own or somebody else’s, and you see that no formal structure exists yet while there is no visible chaos either, you are looking at exactly this stage. This is not the moment to lay an org chart over it for the sake of having one. The useful question is a different one: which rituals have already formed on their own, which roles have already settled informally, who has already become the assembly point for a particular class of decision.

An attempt to introduce a structure that ignores that spontaneous layer usually fails to produce order. It produces two parallel orders, the official one on paper and the real one in people’s habits, and the two begin to conflict. The head office reads the chart, the local team works the chat, and the first honest signal about the market arrives a quarter late through a channel nobody was watching.

For a foreign company this has a cheap practical form. Before drawing the structure, write down the one that already exists. Who answers clients first. Who is consulted before a decision becomes real. Whether a decision becomes real in the call or in the document. Which reporting artefacts carry information that somebody actually uses, and which are habits carried over from a building you no longer work in. The gap between the chart you were about to draw and the list you have just written is the resistance you would otherwise have paid for. Running that conversation with an outside party is one of the things a working session is for.

One more practical conclusion. If the culture has already set badly, around conflict avoidance, around toxic rivalry, around the silent handing off of responsibility, rewriting it after the fact with a strategy document is close to impossible. It was far cheaper to notice it and steer it at this stage, while it was still flexible and had not yet hardened into a habit that outlives any subsequent reorganisation.

Structure will come later. For now there is a network of people who have already found their rhythm and have simply not said it out loud yet.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Как растёт организация, у которой ещё нет скелета