I was out running yesterday lunchtime (not a good idea in a UK heatwave but that unusual hour gap in my calendar was too good to pass up!).

Running is reflection time for me. Yesterday I was mulling over some of the patterns we’ve seen since launching Mallard earlier this year.

Regardless of the type of business, the sector and the culture of the particular business, we hear very similar refrains from founders on our initial calls:

• “We’re duplicating work.”
• “Nothing falls through the cracks on the surface, but in reality does.”
• “I make sure people are empowered but won’t make decisions.”
• “We communicate constantly but no one knows what’s happening.”

Ring any bells?

Here’s what I was thinking on my run – these aren’t separate problems, or indeed problems at all. They’re really just symptoms needing a better diagnosis.

And founders come to Mallard for help treating the symptoms whilst ignoring the underlying condition.

The condition is structural.

Most scale-ups we work with have outgrown their organisational design without realising it.

They’re still operating with the structure that got you from zero to one, when they’re now trying to get from one to ten.

The entrepreneurial, everyone-does-everything approach that worked brilliantly at fifteen people becomes actively problematic at 25 people and chaos by 50.

But because growth happened gradually – one hire at a time, one new customer at a time – the founder didn’t notice when they crossed the threshold (there’s a boiling frog thing going on here).

And now? Now the business is very much in firefighting mode.

Your “heroes” step forward to save the day (again), whilst resentment quietly builds amongst everyone else. People are busy but somehow core parts of your strategy remain under-supported and ineffective. New starters can’t onboard quickly enough because the business changes shape faster than you can document it.

The irony is clear to me as an outsider: founders create silos by trying to build functional expertise but those silos don’t collaborate.

So then founders schedule more meetings to improve communication, which makes everyone busier, which means less time for actual delivery work or even some thinking time.

What it looks like in practice

Last month, I worked with a business whose product team and sales team literally didn’t speak to each other except through Slack.

That wasn’t because they disliked each other or because anyone was particularly difficult.

But because the handoff process had become so transactional that they’d forgotten they were working on the same thing.

Projects were being delivered but nobody in product knew why clients were buying. And nobody in sales understood what was actually possible to build.

The result? Overpromising, under-delivering and a development roadmap that was built on guesswork rather than genuine customer insight.

Meanwhile the founders kept investing in hiring more people, assuming that the problem was capacity. That was a wrong diagnosis as what was really underneath it all was an organisational architecture problem.

The trust deficit

But here’s the bit that really matters. The bit that I don’t think we talk about enough.

These structural problems that founders end up with can create interpersonal ones.

When people don’t understand what others actually do, trust erodes. When there’s no clear accountability, people either become territorial or completely passive. When the business changes too rapidly for anyone to maintain context, folks retreat into their functional bubbles because those are the only places that make sense.

You end up with talented, well-meaning people who aren’t enjoying their jobs.

Not because they’re lazy or uncommitted but because they’re drowning in confusion, duplication and firefighting.

And the entrepreneurial spirit that built your business in the first place starts to feel like it’s drifting away. It’s genuinely absent from key parts of the organisation because people have learned that sticking their neck out is more hassle than its worth.

So what do we do about it?

Firstly let’s acknowledge that this isn’t a people problem that you can hire your way out of. Let’s frame it as a design problem.

Then here’s what we do at Mallard to unpick this:

Map your actual workflows, not your org chart. Where does work actually flow? Where does it stop? Where does it duplicate? Your org chart shows reporting lines. Your workflows show where value gets created or destroyed.

Identify your critical paths to revenue. What are the absolutely essential processes that generate value for customers? Then ask are those processes treated as critical or are they happening in the gaps between functional teams?

Create cross-functional ownership. Not matrix management (that’s another Build issue in itself) but genuine, end-to-end accountability for outcomes rather than activities. Someone needs to own the whole journey not just their bit of it.

Reduce transactional touchpoints. Every handoff is a failure point. Every handoff requires communication overhead. Every handoff dilutes accountability. Every handoff slows things down. Can you eliminate some entirely?

Make the implicit explicit. What do key people actually do? What decisions can people make without asking? What does good look like? If you can’t articulate this clearly how can anyone else know?

This work is uncomfortable because it requires you to unpick things that are currently working (just not well enough). It’s also not a quick fix.

It requires conversations about accountability that people will find threatening.

It requires you to acknowledge that the way you’ve always done things isn’t the way you need to do things now.

But the alternative is watching your best people burn out whilst your business grows more chaotic.

And here’s the thing I kept coming back to as I struggled for pace on yesterday’s run: you probably already sense this is a problem. The symptoms are screaming at you. You’re just hoping they’ll resolve themselves if you work a bit harder, hire a few more people and put in a few more sync calls.

They won’t.

Take a moment to reflect on what’s really going on:

• When did you last look at your organisational design with fresh eyes, not just your headcount?
• If you could redesign how your business operates from scratch, keeping all the same people but changing how they work together, what would you change first?
• Most importantly what’s the real cost of not addressing this now?