Common sense, despite its name, has proven to be remarkably uncommon in organizational settings, particularly as companies scale from small startups to established enterprises. This paradox creates significant challenges for leaders who must balance the intuitive decision-making that drives early success with the structured processes necessary for sustainable growth. As organizations evolve, the shared understanding that once seemed natural becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, requiring deliberate strategies to preserve sensible decision-making across expanding teams and departments.
The Psychological Foundations of Uncommon Sense
The notion that common sense should be universal stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how human cognition operates in complex environments. What appears obvious to one person often reflects their unique experiences, knowledge, and context rather than universal truths. This becomes particularly evident in organizational settings where diverse backgrounds and specialized roles create vastly different perspectives.
Cognitive psychology offers several explanations for why common sense remains elusive despite its apparent simplicity. Mental models—the frameworks through which we interpret the world—differ dramatically based on our experiences and training. A software engineer approaching a business problem brings an entirely different mental model than a marketing specialist or financial analyst. These diverse perspectives create natural barriers to shared understanding, even among intelligent, well-intentioned colleagues. As Daniel Kahneman explores in his groundbreaking work Thinking, Fast and Slow, our cognitive biases significantly impact our decision-making processes, often without our awareness.
The phenomenon of functional fixedness further complicates matters in organizational contexts. This cognitive bias limits individuals to perceiving objects or situations only in their conventional forms, making it difficult to recognize novel applications or solutions. As employees develop expertise in specific domains, they simultaneously build mental grooves that can restrict creative thinking and holistic problem-solving. The Journal of Experimental Psychology has published numerous studies demonstrating how specialized knowledge can sometimes inhibit innovative thinking, precisely because expertise narrows our focus.
Day-to-day operational demands further erode our capacity for common sense reasoning. The human brain, despite its remarkable capabilities, functions with limited cognitive resources. When these resources become consumed by immediate tasks and established routines, little capacity remains for questioning assumptions or considering broader contexts. This explains why even highly intelligent professionals sometimes miss what later seems like obvious problems or opportunities—their mental bandwidth was simply allocated elsewhere. Research from the Harvard Business Review regularly highlights how cognitive overload undermines strategic thinking across organizational levels.
The natural fragmentation of knowledge in growing organizations compounds these individual cognitive limitations. Information and context that once resided within a small founding team gradually disperses across expanding departments and hierarchical layers. Critical details that inform sensible decisions become siloed, creating situations where no single person possesses the complete picture necessary for truly integrated thinking. Without deliberate mechanisms to counter this fragmentation, organizational common sense inevitably diminishes as companies grow.
Founders vs. Employees: The Sprinter and Marathon Runner Paradox
The fundamental tension between founders and employees in growing organizations bears remarkable resemblance to the different mindsets of sprint runners versus marathon runners. Founders, like sprinters, operate with intense bursts of energy fueled by passion and vision. They make intuitive leaps across disparate information, connecting dots that others might miss. Their comprehensive understanding of the business problem allows them to cut through complexity with seemingly effortless clarity. For the founder, many decisions that appear to require careful deliberation for others represent obvious “common sense” based on their intimate knowledge of the company’s origins and purpose.
Long-term employees, by contrast, function more like marathon runners. They develop specialized expertise and establish sustainable routines that enable consistent performance over extended periods. They focus on efficiency within defined parameters rather than questioning those parameters themselves. This marathon mindset serves valuable organizational purposes, creating stability and dependable execution, but it naturally narrows focus to immediate responsibilities rather than holistic business outcomes. Ben Horowitz, in his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things, discusses this tension extensively from his experience building and leading technology companies.
This dichotomy manifests in daily interactions that can frustrate both sides. Founders grow exasperated when employees fail to pick up critical tasks that fall slightly outside formal job descriptions—tasks that seem obviously important to anyone with complete business context. Employees, meanwhile, may view founders as erratic or unreasonable when they suddenly change direction or expect intuitive understanding of complex situations without sufficient explanation. Neither perspective is inherently wrong; both reflect different relationships to the organization and its mission.
The startup environment naturally privileges the sprinter mindset, rewarding quick pivots and intuitive decision-making. As organizations mature, however, the marathon approach becomes increasingly necessary to maintain consistency and manage complexity. The challenge lies in preserving enough of the founder’s holistic perspective to inform sensible decision-making while building the structured processes that enable scale. Companies that succeed in this balancing act maintain both the visionary capacity that drives innovation and the operational discipline that ensures reliable execution.
In my article on the Scrum methodology, this tension becomes particularly evident. Scrum attempts to balance the structured processes necessary for coordinating complex development work with the adaptive responsiveness that software creation demands. Developers, operating closer to the founder’s sprint mindset, often resist what they perceive as unnecessary process overhead. Managers, concerned with predictability and coordination across teams, embrace the visibility and structure Scrum provides. This paradox reflects the broader challenge of maintaining sensible operations as organizations grow beyond the scale where natural alignment occurs.
The Cognitive Entrapment of Marathon Runners
While marathon runners (long-term employees) excel at sustained execution, they face unique risks of strategic myopia – the inability to see how daily tasks connect to organizational goals. This aligns with the Hungarian adage “nem látja a fától az erdőt” (can’t see the forest for the trees), where repetitive work creates cognitive blind spots.
Psychology of Context Erosion
Three mechanisms drive this disconnect:
Procedural Memory Dominance The brain rewires itself to optimize repetitive tasks, suppressing “unnecessary” strategic context. As shown in Johns Hopkins research, workers handling the same product for years develop auditory blocking – literally losing capacity to process non-routine information. Motivational Blindness JuicedTech’s study reveals 63% of long-term specialists report “autopilot mentality” within 18 months, where completing tasks becomes an end in itself. Entrenchment Effect UCLA research shows repetition creates psychological inertia – workers persist with outdated methods even when better alternatives exist. This explains why teams might keep polishing login animations while users abandon apps over unresolved crashes.
Real-World Consequences
🔍 Feature Myopia
Example: Mobile team spent 6 months perfecting animation physics
Impact: 42% user churn due to unresolved login delays (Product Coalition)
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📋 Process Worship
Example: QA team rejected critical bug fixes to hit “test case completion” KPIs
Impact: $2.1M lost enterprise deals (2019 SaaS Industry Trends)
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🌐 Context Collapse
Example: Engineering team built AI features for a discontinued product line
Impact: 18 months wasted before project cancellation (2023 Startup Failure Analysis)
Solutions from Modern Frameworks
1. Radical Transparency Cycles As practiced at Buffer, teams must physically map their work to current OKRs quarterly using tools like Miro. This exposes misalignments like:
A payments team discovering their “fraud detection optimization” project served a sunsetted product line.
2. Perspective Jogging Adapted from Scrum Retrospectives:
Forest Fridays: Randomly paired colleagues explain each other’s work Strategic Relevance Scores: All tasks graded 1-5 on alignment with company priorities Why Minutes: 60-second daily reminders of task purpose (Utah neuroscience study shows this rebuilds context pathways in 6-8 weeks)
- 3. Anti-Myopia Metrics
- Spotify’s Squad Health Check adds three metrics:
- % work traceable to active priorities
- Confidence in leadership vision (1-10 scale)
- Observed customer impact per feature
The Scrum Paradox Revisited
The daily standups and sprint reviews I critiqued in my original article serve dual purposes:
- For developers: Ritualized interruption to disrupt entrenchment
- For managers: Context-replenishment mechanism
When properly implemented, these “annoying ceremonies” act like cognitive defibrillators – jolting marathon runners out of procedural ruts while giving sprinters (founders) structured insight into execution realities.
Key Takeaway: Long-term execution requires deliberate counter-rhythms to combat natural context erosion. Like forest rangers conducting controlled burns, leaders must design systems that periodically clear procedural undergrowth while preserving strategic sightlines.
The Evolution of Common Sense Through Company Growth Stages
The transformation of common sense through organizational growth follows a predictable pattern across company lifecycles. Understanding this evolution helps leaders anticipate challenges and implement appropriate structures before problems emerge rather than reacting to symptoms of organizational dysfunction.
In seed-stage startups with just a handful of employees, common sense truly lives up to its name. The small founding team shares complete context about business goals, customer needs, and operational challenges. Communication happens continuously and naturally. Team members maintain a holistic view of the business, allowing them to make appropriate judgments even in ambiguous situations. When an early customer reports an issue, everyone understands its significance without formal escalation processes. When a market opportunity arises, the team pivots nimbly without extensive deliberation. This natural alignment represents the purest form of organizational common sense.
As companies enter early growth (typically 10-50 employees), the first cracks in common sense begin to appear. New hires join without the founders’ complete context, creating natural knowledge gaps. The organization remains small enough that formal processes seem unnecessary, yet large enough that information no longer flows naturally to everyone who needs it. This transitional phase often produces the first instances of costly misalignments. A new sales representative might make promises that the product team can’t fulfill because they lack knowledge of technical constraints. A developer might focus exclusively on coding features without considering implementation challenges for customer success teams. These disconnects don’t reflect individual incompetence but rather the inevitable fragmentation of organizational knowledge. The Startup Genome Project has documented these transition challenges extensively in their research on company growth patterns.
During the scale-up phase (50-200 employees), specialized departments form, creating natural information silos. Employees develop deep expertise in their domains but increasingly limited understanding of adjacent functions. What seems obviously important to the product team might appear irrelevant to marketing, leading to misaligned priorities and wasted efforts. At this stage, companies typically implement their first formal processes and specialized tools. Without careful design, however, these very mechanisms can accelerate the loss of common sense by further separating teams and creating bureaucratic barriers to collaboration. The organization becomes vulnerable to the “throw it over the wall” syndrome, where departments complete their assigned tasks without sufficient concern for how their work affects downstream colleagues.
As companies reach maturity (200+ employees), the common sense challenge transforms again. Now the organization faces not just misalignment between departments but potentially redundant or contradictory initiatives. Without robust coordination mechanisms, large companies can develop multiple solutions to the same problem, wasting resources and creating inconsistent experiences. The extreme example of two teams independently developing identical products represents this dysfunction in its purest form. More commonly, mature organizations suffer from incremental inefficiencies—slightly misaligned objectives across departments, partially redundant processes, and gradually diverging understandings of customer needs and business priorities.
Throughout these growth stages, what constitutes “common sense” evolves from an emergent property of small, tight-knit teams to something that must be deliberately engineered into organizational structures, processes, and culture. The intuitive alignment of the startup phase can never be fully recaptured, but with thoughtful leadership, companies can maintain many of its benefits even as they grow.
The Tipping Point: When to Formalize Processes
Determining the right moment to implement formal processes represents one of the most critical and challenging decisions for growing organizations. Formalize too early, and you risk strangling the creativity and agility that drive startup success. Wait too long, and you may face costly mistakes, misalignments, and fragmentation that become increasingly difficult to correct as they become embedded in organizational culture.
Several warning signs indicate when formalization may be necessary. Recurring mistakes across different team members suggest the need for standardized approaches. When knowledge becomes concentrated in a few individuals, creating bottlenecks and operational risks, documentation and knowledge transfer processes become essential. When decisions made by one team consistently surprise or undermine other teams, coordination mechanisms are needed. Perhaps most tellingly, when quality becomes inconsistent or customer experiences vary dramatically depending on who handles them, formal processes become necessary to ensure reliability. The Lean Startup methodology, developed by Eric Ries, provides valuable frameworks for identifying these inflection points.
The earliest process needs typically emerge around customer interactions, finance, and cross-team dependencies. A growing company might first formalize its sales process to ensure consistent messaging and expectation setting. Financial controls become necessary once transaction volumes increase beyond what can be managed informally. Project handoffs between teams often require formal definition once the organization grows beyond the point where everyone can maintain awareness of all ongoing work.
However, process formalization shouldn’t mean rigid bureaucracy. The most effective processes preserve flexibility while providing sufficient structure to ensure consistency and alignment. This balance requires what organizational theorists call “minimum viable bureaucracy”—the lightest weight processes that effectively address specific coordination problems without creating unnecessary constraints. Rather than comprehensive process frameworks that dictate every action, successful organizations implement targeted interventions that solve particular challenges while preserving autonomy wherever possible.
The formalization process itself should begin with clarity about the specific problem being addressed. Rather than implementing processes for their own sake, leaders should identify particular challenges that hamper organizational effectiveness. For instance, if customer onboarding proves inconsistent, a flexible framework that ensures key steps aren’t missed while allowing for appropriate customization provides the right balance of structure and adaptability. Documentation should focus on principles and decision criteria rather than rigid procedural steps, preserving room for judgment while ensuring decisions align with organizational values and objectives.
Regular review and refinement of processes remains essential as organizations continue to evolve. Processes that once made perfect sense can become outdated or counterproductive as circumstances change. Building mechanisms for continuous improvement helps prevent processes from ossifying into obstacles rather than enablers. Some organizations implement regular “process debt” reviews, analogous to technical debt reviews in software development, to identify and streamline procedures that no longer serve their original purpose effectively.
The Scrum Paradox: Process as Solution and Problem
The tension between formalization and common sense appears particularly evident in software development methodologies like Scrum. As explored in my article “The Scrum Paradox: Why Developers Despise What Managers Adore”, Scrum represents both an attempt to address the coordination challenges of complex work and a manifestation of the uncommon sense phenomenon in growing organizations.
Scrum emerged as a response to the limitations of traditional project management in software development. It breaks work into manageable increments, creates visibility through tangible artifacts, and facilitates adaptation through regular feedback cycles. In many ways, it represents an attempt to formalize common sense approaches to complex work—making progress visible, receiving regular feedback, and continuously improving based on experience.
However, as I articulate in my analysis, developers often resist Scrum while managers embrace it enthusiastically. This paradox reveals the fundamental tension in process formalization across organizations. Developers, closest to the technical work, frequently perceive Scrum ceremonies and artifacts as bureaucratic overhead that adds little value to their core creative tasks. They experience the process requirements as constraints on their problem-solving approach rather than enablers of better outcomes. The daily standups, story point estimations, and sprint planning sessions feel like artificial impositions that interrupt their natural workflow and creative momentum.
Managers, conversely, value precisely what developers resist—the visibility, predictability, and coordination that Scrum provides. From their perspective, Scrum solves critical organizational challenges by making progress transparent, facilitating cross-team dependencies, and creating predictable delivery cadences. The very aspects that developers experience as constraints, managers experience as necessary structure for effective coordination across complex systems.
The conflicting perspectives on Scrum mirror the broader challenge of maintaining common sense in growing organizations. The freedom that developers crave represents the natural working mode of small, aligned teams where context is shared and coordination happens organically. The structure that managers seek addresses the inevitable coordination challenges that emerge as organizations scale beyond the point where natural alignment suffices. Neither perspective is wrong; they simply reflect different organizational needs that must somehow be reconciled.
Successful Scrum implementations navigate this tension by maintaining the methodology’s spirit rather than rigidly enforcing its practices. They adapt ceremonies and artifacts to fit specific team contexts while preserving the core principles of transparency, inspection, and adaptation. They create space for technical creativity while providing enough structure to enable effective collaboration across team boundaries. Most importantly, they recognize that no process framework can entirely replace the need for good judgment, clear communication, and shared understanding—the elements that constitute genuine common sense in any context.
The Adaptability Crisis: Why Companies Fail to Change
Perhaps the most profound failure of organizational common sense manifests in the inability to adapt to changing environments. Steven Bartlett, in his book The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life, frequently references a cautionary example of a major fashion retailer that refused to invest in online marketing despite clear evidence of shifting consumer behaviors. Having built decades of success through traditional advertising channels, the company remained committed to familiar approaches long after their effectiveness diminished. By the time they recognized their error, competitors had established dominant online positions, and the company eventually closed its doors—a victim not of external disruption but of internal rigidity.
This adaptability failure occurs across industries and organizations of all sizes. It represents not merely strategic error but a fundamental breakdown in what should be common sense—the recognition that environments change and organizations must evolve accordingly. Several psychological and organizational factors contribute to this adaptability crisis in established companies.
Success creates powerful cognitive inertia that resists change even when evidence indicates its necessity. When organizations succeed using certain approaches, those methods become embedded in organizational identity and self-perception. “This is how we do things” transforms from description to prescription, making it difficult to question established methods even as their effectiveness diminishes. The psychological principle of confirmation bias further reinforces this tendency, causing leaders to notice evidence that supports existing approaches while discounting contrary signals. The fashion retailer in Bartlett’s example likely interpreted initial online marketing failures as confirmation that their traditional approaches remained superior, rather than recognizing the need for learning and adaptation in the new channel.
Organizational structures frequently calcify around past solutions rather than present challenges. Departments, roles, and processes perfectly suited to yesterday’s business environment persist long after that environment has transformed. The fashion retailer’s marketing department had likely built deep expertise in print and television advertising, creating institutional resistance to shifting resources toward unfamiliar digital channels where that expertise held less value. Career advancement paths, performance metrics, and resource allocation models all reinforced the status quo despite changing market realities.
Fear of failure further inhibits adaptation, particularly in successful organizations. As companies build reputations and market positions, the perceived cost of mistakes increases dramatically. This risk aversion creates environments where maintaining familiar approaches feels safer than exploring uncertain alternatives, even when continuing current strategies carries substantial long-term risk. The retailer likely feared the uncertain returns of digital marketing experiments compared to their predictable traditional campaigns, not recognizing that the greater risk lay in doing nothing as consumer behaviors shifted dramatically.
Finally, siloed information prevents holistic adaptation in complex organizations. When customer insights, technological developments, and competitive intelligence remain trapped within specific departments, the organization cannot develop coherent responses to environmental changes. The fashion retailer’s e-commerce team (if it existed) may have recognized the shift to online shopping, but without influence over marketing budget allocations, their insights couldn’t drive organizational adaptation. The MIT Sloan Management Review has published extensive research on how information silos consistently undermine organizational agility.
These factors create a profound paradox: as organizations become more successful and established, they often become less capable of the adaptation that common sense would dictate. The very structures and processes implemented to scale success become barriers to continued evolution. Leaders must therefore deliberately design for adaptability, creating mechanisms that challenge assumptions, facilitate information flow across boundaries, and legitimize experimentation even during periods of success.
Cultivating Common Sense in Growing Organizations
While the natural, intuitive common sense of small teams can never be fully replicated in larger organizations, several approaches can preserve its most valuable aspects while accommodating necessary formalization. Creating balanced systems requires attention to structures, processes, and culture that support sensible decision-making at all organizational levels.
Creating shared context represents the foundation of organizational common sense. Leaders must invest in communication mechanisms that give employees visibility into the broader business environment beyond their immediate responsibilities. This includes transparent sharing of company strategy, customer feedback, and market developments. Regular all-hands meetings provide opportunities to reinforce connections between individual work and organizational objectives. Some companies implement “context documents” that accompany projects and decisions, explicitly stating the background, constraints, and objectives that inform the work. These artifacts help employees understand not just what they’re expected to do but why it matters, enabling more sensible decision-making in ambiguous situations. Buffer, the social media management platform, has pioneered many of these transparent communication practices.
Promoting cross-functional exposure helps combat the specialization paradox that undermines common sense in growing organizations. Rotation programs that allow employees to experience different roles and departments build broader understanding and empathy across organizational boundaries. Cross-functional project teams create natural environments for diverse perspectives to blend, often generating insights that specialized teams would miss. Some organizations implement “shadowing” programs where employees spend time observing colleagues in different roles, gaining appreciation for their challenges and perspectives. These experiences help employees develop more integrated mental models that support sensible decision-making across functional boundaries. Spotify’s squad model represents an interesting approach to maintaining cross-functional alignment at scale.
Designing for appropriate autonomy allows common sense to flourish within structured environments. Rather than creating rigid processes that dictate every action, organizations can implement guardrails that define boundaries while leaving room for judgment within those boundaries. This approach often takes the form of principles-based rather than rules-based governance. For example, instead of prescribing exactly how to handle customer issues, a principles-based approach might articulate values like “resolve issues at first contact when possible” and “prioritize long-term customer relationships over short-term costs,” then trust employees to apply those principles using their judgment. This balance preserves the organizational benefits of consistency while allowing for the contextual adaptation that common sense requires.
Intentional knowledge management prevents the loss of context and rationale that often accompanies growth. Documentation should capture not just what decisions were made but why they were made, preserving the context for future reference. Some organizations implement “decision journals” that record the factors considered, alternatives explored, and reasoning behind significant choices. These artifacts help new employees understand the thinking behind existing approaches and enable more informed evolution as circumstances change. Rather than treating documentation as a tedious requirement, forward-thinking organizations view it as crucial infrastructure for maintaining institutional memory and enabling sensible evolution.
Cultivating a culture of constructive challenge prevents the calcification of thinking that undermines organizational common sense. Leaders should explicitly encourage questioning of established approaches and demonstrate openness to diverse perspectives. This requires creating psychological safety where employees feel comfortable raising concerns without fear of negative consequences. Regular retrospectives, adapted from agile methodologies, provide structured opportunities to reflect on what’s working and what isn’t, making continuous improvement part of the organizational rhythm. Organizations that maintain this questioning mindset avoid the gradual drift into procedural compliance without understanding that characterizes many mature companies. Google’s Project Aristotle research identified psychological safety as the most critical factor in high-performing teams.
Finally, connecting everyone to customer reality provides a north star for common sense decision-making. When employees across functions have direct exposure to customer experiences and challenges, they develop an intuitive understanding of what matters that no process could fully capture. Customer visits, support shadowing, user testing observation, and similar experiences should be distributed broadly across the organization rather than confined to customer-facing roles. This direct exposure to customer reality creates shared reference points that inform sensible decisions even when formal processes don’t address particular situations.
Conclusion: The Art of Uncommon Common Sense
The paradox of common sense in growing organizations reveals fundamental tensions in human coordination. What appears obvious to individuals based on their unique perspective and experience rarely translates perfectly to others with different backgrounds and responsibilities. As organizations grow, this challenge intensifies, requiring deliberate attention to the structures, processes, and cultures that enable effective collective action.
The journey from startup to established company necessarily involves formalization and specialization. These changes bring valuable efficiency and scalability but risk undermining the intuitive alignment that characterizes small teams. The art of organizational design lies in preserving the best aspects of startup common sense while building the structures needed for larger-scale operation. This balance requires ongoing attention rather than one-time solutions, as the appropriate equilibrium shifts with organizational growth and environmental changes.
Leaders play a crucial role in this balancing act. By maintaining transparent communication about context and rationale, designing processes that guide rather than constrain, and modeling adaptability in their own thinking, they set the tone for the entire organization. The most effective leaders recognize that preserving common sense isn’t about avoiding formalization but about implementing it thoughtfully, with continuous attention to where structure adds value and where it creates unnecessary constraints.
As organizations navigate growth, they inevitably lose some of the natural alignment that characterizes founding teams. However, with deliberate attention to communication, knowledge sharing, and organizational design, they can maintain many of the benefits of common sense even as they scale. The result isn’t perfect alignment—no large organization can achieve that—but rather a productive tension between specialization and integration, process and flexibility, that enables effective action in complex environments.
In a world of accelerating change and increasing complexity, this capacity for “uncommon common sense” represents perhaps the most valuable organizational capability. It allows companies to benefit from the efficiency of specialized expertise and consistent processes while maintaining the adaptability and holistic thinking needed to thrive in dynamic environments. For leaders navigating organizational growth, fostering this capability deserves the highest priority—not as a luxury, but as the essential foundation for sustained success in an increasingly complex business landscape.
© Gabor Mayer. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Free to share and adapt with attribution.