An organisation starts with tension, not with an idea

People rarely open a business because they came up with a brilliant idea. More often they open one because where they were became unbearably cramped. Something was pressing on them: the environment demanded one thing and they could give another, or they wanted more and the environment did not respond. An organisation is not born from inspiration. It is born from tension.

The arrangement at the very beginning is simple. Before there is a team, an office or a first client, this stage contains exactly one thing: a node in an environment.

This is the first stage of the model I described in how organisations grow from a single node to holacracy. I want to stay on it, because much of what goes wrong later, including when a foreign company opens a Russian operation, is decided here.

The node and its three environments

Picture a point: an entrepreneur, a specialist, anyone who begins to act on their own account. That is the node. It does not appear in a vacuum. It appears inside three environments simultaneously.

The physical environment is resources, territory, the weather of the market, the availability of materials. The social environment is counterparties: clients, competitors, partners, regulators, everyone the node enters into a relationship with. The informational environment is dictionaries and languages: professional jargon, symbolic culture, the codes by which people in this niche are accustomed to understanding one another.

Where the node meets each of the three environments there is a membrane, and on that membrane tension keeps arising. Resources fall short: tension at the physical level. A counterparty does not understand or does not trust: tension at the social level. The node speaks a language other than the one its market speaks: tension at the informational level.

An organisation is needed for exactly one purpose: to relieve that tension. Not to make money and not to fulfil a mission. Those come later and sit on top as a superstructure. At the foundation is the relief of tension on the membrane.

What the three environments look like from outside Russia

For a company that sells into Russia from another country, this is where the model stops being abstract. At home the three membranes were calibrated over years. The team knew where materials came from, which counterparties could be trusted and what words the market used. In Russia all three membranes shift at the same time, and the shifts are of different kinds.

The physical membrane moves first and is the easiest to see. Payment routes, delivery, the availability of specific services work differently, and a plan built on home assumptions strains within months. This is the tension companies notice, because it arrives as a logistics or finance problem with a name attached.

The social membrane moves more quietly. Counterparties are new and so is the pattern of trust. In Russian business practice much of it is built through personal contact and through people who vouch for one another, and a contract without that layer behind it carries less weight than a foreign head office expects. The tension here does not arrive as a complaint. It arrives as silence: replies that slow down, deals that stall for reasons nobody states.

The informational membrane moves most of all, and it is the one foreign companies read worst. The search engine is Yandex, whose logic differs from Google’s. The everyday channels are Telegram and VK rather than the platforms your marketing team grew up with. Your category has its own Russian vocabulary, and a translated website that keeps the English phrasing speaks, in the model’s terms, a language other than the one the market speaks. The node is talking, the market hears something else, and the tension gets attributed to weak demand or a bad agency rather than to the membrane where it lives.

So a foreign company almost always misplaces its tension. It feels pressure on the informational membrane and treats it as a physical problem: more budget, more stock, more staff. Locating the tension on the right membrane comes before any channel decision. That is what customer research is for at this stage: to hear, in the market’s own words, where the node and the environment fail to meet.

Desire, need, motive: three floors of the same thing

Here it is worth separating three words that ordinary speech mixes together.

Desire is the tension on the membrane itself. It lives in the unconscious. It has no form yet and no name. The person feels that something is wrong, that something is missing, but cannot say what. This is the pre-symbolic level.

Need is desire that has found an object. The tension has acquired an outline: “I do not have enough clients”, “I need a partner who understands finance”, “this place needs a different product”. A need can already be spoken, but it is still speculative: it describes a shortage, not a plan of action.

Motive is the next level of awareness. It is a need that has found a direction: “I do this in order to get that”. A motive can be checked, discussed and corrected.

Three floors of one and the same energy. Most management mistakes happen precisely because someone talks to a person at the level of motive, “why are you doing this?”, while the problem sits at the level of desire, where there are no words, only a vague pressure.

For an international team this happens twice over. A head office asks its Russian manager for motives: what is the plan, what are the targets, why this channel. The manager, standing on the membrane, is feeling a desire that has not yet become a need. The reports are full of motives, the reality is full of unnamed tension, and the two conversations never touch.

The compensatory model: an organisation as a prosthesis

Nobody comes into a business fully functional. Everyone has a zone where they are strong and a zone where they are helpless. A founder has a superb feel for the product and is terrible at counting money. A specialist negotiates brilliantly and cannot organise a working day.

An organisation arises as a compensatory mechanism. The individual gives it what they do well, and it gives them what they lack. The accountant closes the entrepreneur’s blind spot in numbers. A colleague with a cool head closes the blind spot of someone who drowns in emotion at the negotiating table.

There is a subtlety that is easy to miss. This functional adaptation is not experienced as a rational deal. It is experienced as something personal, almost intimate. A person whose blind spot has been closed by their work often feels towards it what they themselves call attachment, devotion, sometimes love: “this is my life’s work”, “I cannot manage without this team”. There is nothing mystical about it. It is gratitude for compensation: where there was tension and helplessness, there is now support.

Seen this way, a Russian office or a local partner is a prosthesis for a foreign node. It closes the home team’s blind spots in all three environments at once: who can be trusted, how things are paid for, what words the market uses. That is why the first local partner or hire carries so much weight, and why companies feel it so personally when it goes wrong. The prosthesis was holding up a whole side of the body.

How to read this in an interview

When you need to understand a manager at this stage, what works is not a set of personal questions but a view from outside in, through the environment.

A PESTLEC walk, through politics, economics, society, technology, law, ecology and culture, gives the first layer: what the person actually knows about the environment they are acting in. Do they distinguish that the environment presses differently in different territories, in different niches, in different periods? A manager who answers in templates, who sees no difference between regions or between seasons of the market, is most likely reading the membrane poorly and will build the organisation poorly for exactly that reason: they cannot see where the tension comes from.

For Russia this test is unusually sharp. The physical and social environments differ substantially between a capital city and a regional centre, and a manager who describes “the Russian market” as one thing has already failed the first layer. A head office should listen for this in its own people as much as in candidates.

Next comes self-definition: who the person sees themselves as, and how that self-definition is realised in these specific environmental conditions, not in the abstract. Only then, what desires and needs the contact with the environment produces in this particular person. Here the method of nonviolent communication is useful. It helps separate an accusation against the environment, “the market is unfair”, from the naming of one’s own tension, “I do not have enough predictability”.

Such a conversation goes beyond diagnosis. It is the working-through of the transition from one stage to the next, an initiation that either happens or gets stuck. I open a marketing session with it, because otherwise any plan for the month rests on a motive the person announced rather than a tension they feel.

What this changes

If you are standing at the start of a business yourself, or helping someone else stand there, the first question is not “what is your strategy”. It is “where exactly is it cramped for you”. On which of the three levels, physical, social or informational, has the tension accumulated that demands a way out.

The second question matters even more: are you talking right now about a desire, a need or already a motive? If a person names a motive but behaves as though an unformed desire is raging inside, the gap between the two is the point where the real work is.

For a company entering Russia from abroad, ask both questions of the Russian operation separately from the parent: it is a new node on new membranes, and the tension it feels is its own. Expect the answer to sit on the informational membrane more often than the reports suggest, and be wary of any plan that arrives fully formed as a motive in the first weeks, before the node has had time to feel anything.

Before you build a structure, set up processes or invent a mission, it is worth admitting a simple thing. At the foundation of any organisation lies not a plan but a membrane on which something became cramped. Everything else is a way of living with that.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Организация начинается не с идеи, а с напряжения