Summary
- We obsess over growth and upside, but ignore the mess and downsides that grow alongside it.
- As organizations scale, disorder, stress, and inefficiency scale too.
- When the mess outgrows the organization’s ability to manage it, growth plateaus.
- The hard but necessary move is to slow down growth, clean up the mess, then continue growing.
- Most leaders avoid this step because it feels like giving up progress.
- Mess must be addressed continuously, not after it becomes overwhelming.
- Growth requires cleaning as you go, just like cooking while washing dishes.
- A practical framework for managing mess is: eliminate, automate, then delegate.
- First, eliminate work that does not serve the desired outcome.
- Second, automate what must remain using technology.
- Only delegate after elimination and automation are exhausted.
- Reducing mess before scaling allows far greater long-term growth.
- Organizations that manage mess intentionally can scale much further than those that chase growth alone.
We love the idea of scale. So, if you’re here, you’re probably interested in ideas of growth. We like to look at the upside, at the positive stuff, and it’s great. It helps us get into motion. We go on to do bigger and better things. But our focus is almost entirely on the upside that we forget to look at the downsides, the mess that gets created when we focus entirely on the upside. And as a result, we don’t have time to clean up the downside.
So a good example would be a system that generates a lot of waste, or is ineffective, or has a lot of pollution. So for example, Coca-Cola, they have an upside. Yes, they’re doing well profitably. Let’s say they’re growing. But think of all the mess they’re creating, all the health issues that are coming as a result of drinking sugary drinks. And this also happens in small organizations.
So this blue line represents growth. It represents the upsides, profit, market share, all these beneficial things that we all seek and we all hyperfixate on. The downside right here is the mess, the organizational stress, the literal mess of organization in the back end, your staff, people scrambling to figure out what to do, all these things. As you scale, the upsides go up. Yes, the downsides also go up. So, as you’re growing, the downsides will also start to scale.
So, what happens is we hit a plateau. When we reach a point where our organization can no longer manage that level of mess, that level of disorder, of chaos. And the path forward would be to take a step back and to actually slow down growth here, fix the mess, and then continue to grow again, which would lead us to this curve. Right here, we’re fixing the mess. But this is very hard to do. It’s very hard once you’ve grown a certain degree. It’s very hard to turn away from that growth because you’ve worked so hard for it.
And what happens is that leaders tend to avoid stepping back to fix the mess. And so they end up in this plateau. It’s a very counterintuitive approach to take at this point. So what happens is this will happen for a long time until they realize that something has to change, and then they’ll take a step back. They’ll clean up the mess and then their organization will finally be able to support them the way it was meant to.
So the alternative approach is to understand that mess also scales. If I want to grow, I’m going to have to at the same time be cleaning up. I can create the best gourmet meal ever and then if you look at the kitchen sink, there’s going to be a pile of dishes loaded up. How am I going to make another meal? If as I make the nice dish, I’m going to have to be cleaning up as well.
So that’s exactly the approach that we want to take when it comes to growing. We’re too quick to focus on the benefits, the profits, the admiration, and all these positive things, and we forget about the downside. So when we hit a plateau, we’ve been fixated on this thing so long that we can’t address this, and our focus is so much here that it becomes too dangerous for us to step back and take a dip right here.
So here’s the approach that I take and typically recommend. Slow down the growth. Growth is great and we should pursue it. We can take this approach as well, grow and go up, that’s perfectly valid as well. But I am very fixated on fixing growth. And this is a concept I got from Tim Ferriss.
Tim Ferriss has a heuristic for organizational mess. He eliminates, automates, or delegates. Eliminate, automate, or delegate. So E, A, and D.
So you look at the activity that you’re doing and you ask yourself, is this something that we need to continue doing? And as an aside, this is also an approach Elon Musk takes. So you look at the organization, the activities you are doing, and you ask yourself, can we eliminate this? Is it even serving a function that our people, who we choose to serve, want?
And if you’re not sure, check out my video on feelings, desired feelings. We all are aiming for a desired feeling. So if it’s not providing that, we eliminate it. So boom, our mess goes down.
All right, let’s say we can’t eliminate it. We need to continue doing this as an organization. Then automate it. We have so much incredible technology that’s not being leveraged that helps us automate, that helps us organize, that removes decisions and makes it easier for us to handle more things. And boom, again, the mess goes down.
And then finally, delegate. It’s too tempting to just quickly delegate everything. And that’s a common issue I see a lot in leadership. We run into mess and a leader doesn’t want to deal with it, so he ends up delegating it.
Whereas what I’m challenging you to do is to take two additional steps. First, ask if we can eliminate it. Is it even useful? Do we even need it? And if not, why are we having our organization do it?
And then the second question is, can we automate it? If this is something that has to be done, is there a technology? Technology has been growing so much it’s hard to keep up. So can we take maybe a day or two to look for potential solutions to automate this thing so that our organization doesn’t have to do it?
And then finally, if none of that is possible, then we can delegate it. And that approach leads to very minimal mess.
So here, let’s say we’re trying to grow and our mess factor, I don’t know what to call it. Let’s say we start off with a mess factor of five. Whatever our profit is here, and we’re trying to grow our organization ten times, this is going to grow to fifty. Pretty self-explanatory.
But here, let’s say I take all my time to reduce it to point five. I’m eliminating stuff we don’t need to do and I’m automating it, so it becomes very easy.
And this has happened a lot in my organization where our team members are just engaging with work for an hour a day. They’re done with work. There’s nothing more to be done. And I don’t feel like we have to fill in the day because I know we’ve eliminated stuff that doesn’t need to be done. We’ve taken the time and effort to identify those. And we’ve also strategically eliminated things that don’t align with our strategy. And we’ve taken a lot of effort to automate stuff.
So things are so much easier. And now if we scale this, it becomes five. So let’s say the breaking point was fifty. They have to stop here. We can go another ten times more. So while they’re only evolving ten times, we’ve evolved one hundred times.
And that’s how mess scales. And this can be an ongoing process. But what I’m trying to say is that if we don’t focus on the mess at all, we will never be able to understand why we should take a step back from only the positive aspects of growth.
And this approach allows you to hit higher and higher ceilings as you grow, continuously working on this, continuously eliminating, continuously automating, and then finally delegating.