Growth of Organization - Evolution & Revolution

In the last blog, we summarized the relation between technology and task interdependence. From today's blog over the next few blogs we look at some of the theories that deal with the growth of an organization, these are mostly based on the HBR paper - “Evolution and Revolution as organizations of growth" by Larry E Greiner.

The basic principle on which the growth of an organization could be predicted is that it is less determined by the environmental forces and more defined by the history of the organization! To understand the paper further, we would need to understand the 2 terms

1. Evolution
2. Revolution

Evolution stands for a phase in the growth of the organization where no major upheaval has occurred. It is relatively a stable period.

Revolution stands for a phase where substantial turmoil is felt in the organization. 

The famous adage - what goes up comes down it something that could be related to in this scenario. Every Evolutionary phase would be creating its own revolution. The nature of the management solution is what would determine whether a company would move forward into the next stage of evolutionary growth.

Let’s take an example to get this clearer - Generally start ups begin with a phase where entrepreneur is the central decision making authority. He/She works out most of the decisions to be taken regarding the company or the firm single handedly. As the company scales up, we begin seeing that the complexity of the decisions to be made would not be best decided by the entrepreneur. There needs to be a decentralization of these decisions to ensure that the company moves ahead smoothly.