"Arrrrrggh!" a founder says. "I have more and more work I don't like. And the organisation is not as fun and fast as it used to be. And everybody is asking me about another operational thing!"
When something breaks in a growing company, it usually breaks for the same reason: the organisation now needs something it isn't yet getting, and the founder isn't yet doing it. The friction isn't a sign that something is wrong with the company, or wrong with the founder. The friction is the gap between the two.
I have seen this a bunch of times when helping founders navigate the rough seas of scaling a company. For the Ducttape to COO framework and the virtual COO I figured that I may have opinions and experience, but there must be research about this right?
So I dove in. And it turns out three well-known models describe this gap from different angles. I will walk you all three and then return to how to apply this.
The three angles:
- Larry Greiner mapped it onto the organisation.
- Rachel Turner mapped it onto the founder.
- Les McKeown mapped it onto the texture of daily work.
A fourth source — Ichak Adizes — explains why founders resist that transition.
Read together — and held next to a concrete operational maturity lens — they tell a more useful story than any of them tells alone.
Three lenses on the same journey
Greiner: the organisation grows through crises
Let's start with Greiner. Very well known, established, and the oldest perspective. Greiner's model (1972, revised 1998) describes five phases of organisational growth, each ending in a crisis that forces the next phase into being:
- Creativity — small, founder-led, informal. Ends in a leadership crisis: the founder can no longer hold everything.
- Direction — first management layer, processes appear. Ends in an autonomy crisis: middle managers want decision rights the founder won't give up.
- Delegation — decentralised, accountable units. Ends in a control crisis: the centre loses visibility.
- Coordination — formal systems, headquarters function. Ends in a red-tape crisis: process strangles speed.
- Collaboration — matrixed, team-based, culture-led.
What I find the most useful idea in Greiner is not the phases, but the crisis. Growth doesn't happen smoothly; it happens because something stops working. The leadership crisis isn't a failure of the founder — it's the signal that the organisation needs the next phase. It is not easy. Greiner's lasting irony: the practices that solve one phase become the problem that forces the next. Today's fix is tomorrow's crisis.
I remember me, Damian and Nalden sharing notes from the book "The Hard Things about Hard Things" while going through ons of these phases. There are no shortcuts. But maybe even more important, like pain, that crisis is a useful message that something is wrong. Or misaligned.
Turner: the founder shifts through leadership modes
Rachel Turner's Founder's Survival Guide (2022) looks from another side. She abstracts the journey to three leadership modes the founder must learn to flex between:
- Brave Warrior — bold, intuitive, fast, hands-on. Wins the early war.
- Considered Architect — designs systems, develops people, builds structure.
- Wise Monarch — sets vision, coaches leaders, holds the long view, lets go of operational detail.
Turner's central insight: the mode that won the early war becomes kryptonite when the company needs something else. Founders don't fail because they're missing skills; they fail because they keep leading from their default mode after the business has moved on.
This maps directly onto Greiner's crises. Greiner's leadership crisis is what happens when a Brave Warrior is still running a company that now needs an Architect.
McKeown: the work itself changes texture
Les McKeown's Predictable Success (2010) gives the journey a different kind of name — one that founders recognise immediately because it describes how the work feels:
- Early Struggle — finding product-market fit and cash.
- Fun — you've found it; everything works; the founder's energy carries the company.
- Whitewater — growth has outrun the way you used to work. Decisions slow down. The same mistakes repeat. People point at each other. It stops being fun.
- Predictable Success — growth plus systems. Repeatable wins. The peak.
- Treadmill → Big Rut → Death Rattle — over-process, ossification, decline.
Whitewater is the phase where most founders find me. The business is succeeding hard enough that the old way is breaking, but the new way isn't built yet. The founder feels it before anyone has language for it: I used to enjoy this.
McKeown adds a team typology that explains why Whitewater is so hard to leave: every healthy company needs four styles working together — Visionary (typically the founder), Operator (gets things done), Processor (builds repeatability), and Synergist (translates between the other three). In Fun you only need Visionary and Operator. In Whitewater, you need the Processor — and that's exactly the person the Visionary and Operator instinctively reject as slowing us down.
PAEI: why the founder's strengths resist the transition
Ichak Adizes' PAEI model (from his lifecycle work) sharpens the same point with different vocabulary. Every healthy organisation needs four functions they say: Producer (delivers results), Administrator (systematises and controls), Entrepreneur (vision and change), and Integrator (builds culture and connection). No single person can carry all four.
Founders in the early phases are typically strong on E (Entrepreneur) and P (Producer) and weak on A (Administrator) and I (Integrator). The company succeeds at the start because of E and P. So when growth demands more A (Administrator) — process, structure, predictability — the founder experiences it as boring, slowing, bureaucratic. Not because A is wrong, but because A isn't where their identity lives. The Producer-Entrepreneur founder protects the E and P by quietly resisting the A.
This is the deeper mechanism under Turner's kryptonite point. Your strengths gave you success, status, and identity. The transition isn't a skill problem. It's an identity problem dressed as a skills problem.
Reading them together
Across the three models, the same transition keeps showing up under different names:
| Stage of company | Greiner | Turner | McKeown | PAEI dominant |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Finding it | Creativity | Brave Warrior | Early Struggle → Fun | E, P |
| The hard middle | Leadership / Autonomy crisis | Warrior → Architect | Whitewater | A must enter |
| Built it | Direction → Delegation | Considered Architect | Predictable Success | P, A, E, I balanced |
| Leading it | Coordination → Collaboration | Wise Monarch | Predictable Success | I and E lead |
*Greiner compression: “Finding it” is Creativity; the hard middle spans the leadership crisis (Creativity → Direction) and the autonomy crisis (Direction → Delegation). “Built it” starts once Direction sticks and Delegation begins — not a single Greiner phase.
The hard middle is the same place. Greiner names it by what's failing structurally. Turner names it by what the founder must become. McKeown names it by how the work feels. PAEI names it by which function is missing. They're describing one moment from four sides of the room.
And here's where my own working hypothesis lives: when things go wrong in this middle, it's because the organisation needs something it isn't yet getting, and the founder isn't yet doing it. The friction isn't a defect. It's the gap announcing itself.
Matching the models to operational maturity
The three frameworks describe that the transition happens. They're less specific about what changes operationally — which is where the Duct Tape to COO diagnostic comes in.
I've been refining a way to assess where each individual process sits, regardless of where the company as a whole is, and this is where I have landed on so far:
- Informal — it gets done, but ad hoc.
- Informally owned — someone reliably does it, but ownership isn't explicit.
- Formally owned — ownership is named, recognised, and clear.
- Documented and maintained — the process is written down, owned, and kept current.
The interesting thing about putting this next to the growth models is what it reveals: companies don't sit cleanly in one growth phase. They sit in a distribution of process maturities. A Whitewater phase company typically has a handful of processes at informally done, most informally owned, almost none documented and formally owned. The journey through Whitewater is, operationally, the journey of moving processes up the stages.
Here's how the maturity stages map onto the growth frameworks:
| Maturity stage | What it looks like | Maps to |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Informal | The founder or one trusted person handles it. No one else really knows how. | Greiner Creativity. Turner Brave Warrior. McKeown Fun. PAEI: pure P and E. |
| 2. Informally owned | Someone reliably owns it in practice but not on paper. If they leave, it breaks. | The early signs of Whitewater. The leadership crisis beginning. Warrior peaking, Architect not yet present. A is still missing. |
| 3. Formally owned | Ownership is explicit and recognised by the team. The owner has authority to change how it's done. | The Whitewater-to-Predictable-Success transition. The founder is becoming Architect. A is entering. |
| 4. Documented and maintained | The process is written, the owner keeps it current, new people can pick it up. | Predictable Success. Considered Architect. PAEI in balance. |
The maturity model I made gives the growth models something they don't have on their own: a way to see, process by process, where the friction lives. You don't transition a company through Whitewater in one heroic act. You move processes up, one at a time, in the order the friction demands.
And the friction always points to the same thing: a process the organisation needs formally owned but the founder is still treating as informal. That's the gap where the work is.
What this means in practice
If you're a founder reading this and recognising the underlying Turner issues how your strengths gave you success, status, and identity, you know you have work to do. Let's start with when you recognise the Whitewater phase: the move that matters isn't delegating more, and it isn't adopting frameworks. It's looking at where you still hold processes informally that the organisation now needs formally owned. You need to map that to get ahead.
And this is about each individual process, not the entire company. So if you're an advisor or operations lead reading this: the diagnostic isn't "what phase is the company in." The dagnostic IS ABOUT: "which processes does the organisation need at stage 3, but that the founder is still running at stage 1?"
Every one of those is a small transition and everyone of them has both an operational shape (write it down, name the owner) and an identity shape (the founder has to let it become someone else's). Both have to move together.
Reach out if you you'd like to compare notes on your experience scaling or would like a second pair of eyes on your Ops. I am doing this to give back to founders and society, so this is not about me doing billable work for you.
P.S. Research notes for this essay: source map (atoms from Greiner, Turner, McKeown, Adizes) and the March research annex (selection rationale, candidates set aside, empirics). Those atoms feed the public wiki via sources → claims → human review → publish — see docs/pipeline.md.