The 2/3 pattern appears at more than one scale

This is the sixth post in a five-part series, which is a slightly embarrassing way to admit that my conclusion wasn't finished.

I had begun to see the 2/3 pattern as a cycle tied to company growth. I even had rough headcounts for each stage. That made the idea easy to explain and too easy to mistake for a prediction.

My first sketch followed headcount

At roughly 0 to 10 people, I often see Leadership + Team carry the company. Strategy is still a hunch being tested. A small group can stay aligned through direct relationships, and the product direction emerges through experimentation.

Somewhere around 10 to 50, a working product bet needs to become a repeatable one. Strategy and Product takes more attention. The team that worked at 10 doesn't automatically work at 30, and the old cohesion begins to strain as new people arrive.

Around 50 to 200, personal relationships can no longer hold the organization together by themselves. Systems appear, teams fragment, and trust can erode as work becomes more formal. Leadership + Team needs attention again or execution suffers.

Those ranges are deliberately rough. I nearly removed them because they invite a false reading: reach 50 people, enter phase three.

A team can face these problems without the company growing at all.

A cycle can begin inside one corner of a company

A product team inside a 500-person company can behave like the 10-person organization in my sketch. A department can inherit a proven strategy and still have to rebuild its relationships. A single project can move through all three combinations without the company around it changing size at all.

In the cases I've seen, a market threat or burnout after a large push could force a team to change its focus without changing its size.

Several teams in the same company can need different things at the same time. Asking which phase the company is in tells me less than asking where people are struggling and what has changed in their work.

A new leader changes the focus

I've seen some of the clearest shifts arrive with a change of leader.

A common version looks like this: a CEO concentrates on Leadership + Strategy until team burnout becomes unsustainable. Their replacement spends time rebuilding Leadership + Team. To people inside the company, the new focus can make the previous one look completely wrong.

The previous approach may have helped the company get that far. But letting it go means questioning decisions the leader was rewarded for making. I've yet to see many leaders make that change deliberately while staying in the role.

I'm still wondering what would help a leader notice the strain early enough to change their own approach. They'd have to take criticism of work that had served them well, while they still had reasons to defend it.

The answer probably depends on the quality of the signals reaching them. In remote teams, those signals take a different route, so I followed that thread in Remote teams and the 2/3 pattern.