Scaling rarely fails because of effort or ambition — it fails when strategy itself cannot travel. This guide explores the growing pains a scale-up CEOs faces, why familiar fixes fall short, and how a strategic narrative makes strategy coherent, narratable, and portable.

Dear CEO,

We understand. It’s been a long slog.

But you finally have product-market fit: Customers are buying. You’re retaining them, and you’re getting good word of mouth.

Congratulations. What started as a sketch on a napkin is now reality.

The killer question: “How the hell do you scale this thing?”

Well, scaling demands structure. So it’s time for you to move out of startup “selling your vision” mode and shift into “building your business” mode.

You can’t do it alone. You have to empower your people to execute independently.

You’ve known this was coming for a while.

Seven growing pains of a scale-up

As your business starts to grow, and your team with it, discussions on “who should be working on what” start cropping up. There are more issues about workflows, processes, functions, handovers, alignment, team roles and responsibilities.

Tactically, roadmaps don’t connect quote as well as they once did, and OKRs aren’t as aligned as they should be.

Often, there’s messaging creep: with multiple versions of your most important messaging starting to appear — slightly different visions and missions, positions and propositions.

Different teams are also now telling slightly different versions of what your company does, where you’re heading, and why it matters.

Investor and board meetings can be spent more on clarifying the basics of your strategy — where you play, how you win — rather than advancing important decisions.

These, and other issues, are typical growing pains for scale-ups (Galbraith, 1974/1977).

Here’s seven of the common ones:

1. No one actually knows what your strategy is

So your management team, and their teams, fill in the gaps with their own interpretations (DeChurch & Mesmer-Magnus, 2007). To be frank, there’s rarely even one shared definition of what strategy itself is.

2. Internal decision-making gets pulled in different directions

Teams start making choices based on their own assumptions around strategy: positioning and propositions; segment A vs segment B, mismatches on ICPs, customer journeys, and more.

3. Teams communicate differently externally

Go-to-market, marketing, sales, product, finance — all communicate slightly differently with the outside world. You start getting messaging-creep across functions.

4. Execution becomes inconsistent

When assumptions, communications and functions are not aligned, delivery itself starts to become inconsistent and unpredictable (Mathieu et al., 2000).

5. You suspect that all of this is impacting your bottom line

Prospects can struggle to understand your value proposition or USP, conversion can suffer, and growth doesn’t feel as steady as it should considering you have product-market fit.

6. Decision making becomes reactive

When you’re not aligned internally as a team, your focus gets pulled outwards. External factors — competitor launches, new features or pricing changes — start to inform your decision making way too much.

7. As CEO, you’re becoming a bottleneck

You’re tackling a wider range of problems than you used to. More of them. And some of them just keep on coming back. What would happen if you took a holiday?

It can be a major pain, but remember that none of this is a personal failing. Growing pains are an entirely natural part of scaling.

Now you’re out of startup mode, your key challenge is coherence.

Coherence is the organisational quality of being logical and consistent — forming a unified, synergetic whole (Okhuysen & Bechky, 2009).

In summary, you need to become bigger than the sum of your parts.

So how should you tackle that?

The leadership transition every scale-up CEO needs to make

Aswath Damodaran, Professor of Corporate Finance and Valuation at NYU Stern, has long argued that companies move through distinct lifecycle phases that make specific demands of a CEO.

The two modes of a CEO we’re referencing in this post are Visionary mode and Pragmatist mode, which correlate with start-ups and scale-ups, respectively.

Crucially, Damodaran argues that a CEO’s effectiveness depends on how well they develop and maintain the company’s story as the organisation grows.

What makes leaders successful in startups is not what makes them successful as a scale-up CEO (Greiner, 1972/1998).

Founder-CEOs especially may find themselves operating in two organisational modes at once.

And it can apply whether your company has 10 people or 60.

Visionary mode (the one that got you where you are)

Here’s how the organisation held together:

• Your business was story-driven: narrative was the basis of investor and market belief
• You carried the core story of the business alone
• Strategic intent lived largely in your head — and in how you talk
• You set direction through your own judgement, context, and personal intervention
• You maintained organisational coherence through being available, and, frankly; repeating yourself to death

What this mode is exceptionally good for:

• Speed
• Early momentum
• Selling belief before you’ve built the proof
• Holding multiple possibilities open while you find product-market fit

What it depends on:

• Your availability
• Your interpretive authority
• Your ability to resolve ambiguities in real time

This mode is exactly what allowed your company to emerge.

But it doesn’t scale.

Pragmatist mode (the one now rearing its head)

How leadership needs to work in this mode:

• You are no longer the primary interpreter of the business
• Functional leaders can start owning decisions:
  • Product priorities
  • GTM focus
  • Operational sequencing
  • Financial assumptions
• Teams should be able to act without constant confirmation

The leadership shift

Leadership in scale-up mode is less about setting direction and more about making your ongoing necessary trade-offs legible for your entire organisation (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991).

Every day, your organisation now has to choose:

• This customer segment, not that one
• This roadmap not that
• This compounding revenue logic, not a different one
• This pace of growth, not another

These trade-offs are unavoidable — and increasingly irreversible.

What this mode now requires from you is:

• Making your business logic explicit, not just your intent
• Communicating the criteria for organisational decision-making

Ultimately, you need to offer a way for others to make the same kinds of judgements you would make — without you in the room (Bachrach et al., 2019).

Caught between modes

At this stage, many scale-up CEOs find themselves caught between:

• Visionary mode that still supplies energy, belief, and possibility
• Pragmatist mode that now needs to drive execution through distributed decisions

But if the logic that connects the two still lives primarily with you, then:

• You might have strategy, but it won’t travel
• Trade-offs end up being made locally, from different assumptions
• You end up becoming the escalation point for all sorts of every day sense-making, not just key decisions

This is why leadership can feel harder — even though the company is succeeding.

The leadership transition from one mode to another can be tough.

What this implies for you as a scale-up CEO

As Damodaran notes, at this point in the company’s lifecycle, the CEO’s role must evolve. Your job is no longer to be the strategy. It is to make the core logic of the strategy narratable.

This enables strategy to travel across teams, functions, and levels — internally and externally — without distortion.

What the organisation needs from you now is not more answers, oversight or enforcement, but a shared causal logic about your business that allows others to:

• Understand the trade-offs you are making and why
• Apply the same logic in their own decisions
• Act coherently without constant escalation

It is one of the defining leadership challenges of the scale-up CEO.

And there are things to watch out for.

Curses and illusions

The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias where a person’s deep knowledge about something — such as a strategy you have lived, ate, slept, and breathed for years — makes it incredibly difficult to properly judge what it will take for someone else to understand it.

People who know a lot about something vastly overestimate how obvious it will be to someone who doesn’t.

As a result, when communicating, they leave gaps in necessary explanatory steps, rely on insider jargon, use far too many metaphors, or skip key pieces of logic — without realising they’re doing so. The outcome is misunderstanding, false assumptions of alignment, and ideas that fail to land despite being actually sound!

Which is why it’s almost always useful to involve an outsider to clarify and test understanding — whether that’s with us, as a natural part of our process, or with a trusted external advisor.

The second thing to watch out for is what we call the coherence illusion.

The coherence illusion is the tendency for leaders to believe their strategy is clear, shared, and aligned because it feels coherent to them — and because the organisation has produced a good amount of strategy decks, documents, OKRs, communications.

Research from MIT Sloan Management Review and others shows that the coherence illusion is widespread.

As we shared in our CEO-CFO guide to strategic narrative in larger organisations, fewer than one in three senior leaders can accurately articulate their company’s strategic priorities. Follow-on analyses further show that while over 90% of senior leaders report that they understand their company’s strategy, only 28% can accurately articulate its key priorities.

We see this even in relatively small organisations, where coherence can appear to exist because one or two individuals become expert gatekeepers of the strategy, rather than the strategy itself being properly socialised, and so, acted upon.

Reaching for the familiar fixes doesn’t work.

The obvious fixes, and why they won’t work

When facing a challenge about a lack of coherence around strategy, most scale-up CEOs reach intuitively for any number of familiar fixes:

• Updated strategy decks
• Alignment off-sites or workshops
• A brand refresh
• Tougher OKRs
• Maybe even a small reorg or change program

They’re the things that any leadership team might reasonably do.

But the problem is that all of these solutions only tackle the surface symptoms:

• More docs → more interpretations
• Workshops → short-lived alignment until reality hits again
• Brand work → polished messages on unstable logic
• OKRs → misalignment is formalised, not fixed (Locke & Latham, 2002)
• Reorganisations → structure amplifies confusion (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014)
• Founder enforcement → bottleneck grows

In fact, addressing these things typically compounds your problem, and defocuses your ability to scale.

What you really need to do is synchronise your strategy and your story.

And that is the primary purpose of a strategic narrative.

Strategic narrative: The missing connective tissue

“There’s the ten stories that a CEO has to tell, or the five stories of marketing … What I’m really looking for, though, is that one story that unites it all.”

— Andy Raskin on strategic narrative

“The mistake people make is thinking the story is about marketing. No, the story is the strategy.”

— Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz

“A strategic narrative is the causal business logic of an organisation — structured in narrative form so people can understand it, believe it, and act on it.”

— Steve Seager, Principal, The House of Narratology

By now, it should be clear that strategic narrative is not a marketing, brand, or communications exercise (Barry & Elmes, 1997).

And in line with Damodaran’s work, managing that narrative in line with the growth stage of your business is the defining criterion of an effective CEO.

A strategic narrative is the missing connective tissue between:

• Your strategy, and
• Your organisation’s ability to share that understanding, and so execute it.

As the leadership transition you’re navigating makes clear, the challenge is not direction, but enabling consistent interpretation across the organisation.

This will not work with “better communication about” your strategy. Instead, it requires a shared causal logic. Only that is what can travel (Green & Brock, 2000).

This is the role strategic narrative plays.

It is the one integrative story that connects your strategy to the whole organisation, linking and enabling all your major functions:

• Finance
• Product
• Sales
• Marketing
• Brand
• Operations
• People

…into a single, intelligible system.

In practice, strategic narrative as the cognitive infrastructure of your company: the logic people use to sense-make, decide, and act when you are not in the room.

Which is why:

• The CEO owns and evangelises the strategic narrative
• Senior leadership repeat and exemplify it
• Sales, marketing, and business development sell it
• PR and content prove and scale it

Operationally, a strategic narrative should live in the CEO’s deck — as the company “gospel” — from which every other deck and piece of collateral should draw.

As Damodaran puts it, a company’s story is part of the hidden connective tissue of its value — and an ongoing leadership responsibility to manage over time. A CEO’s effectiveness rests upon it.

What a strategic narrative gets you

When everyone works from the same underlying logic, alignment becomes natural rather than forced — and the organisation can finally move with clarity, speed, and consistency (Kellermanns et al., 2011).

A strategic narrative becomes the reinforcing system around which the company scales.

It makes strategy tangible.

People understand:

• Where you will play
• How you will win
• And what your endgame is

It gives the organisation a shared language and grammar for sense-making and decision-making.

It provides an organisational “master text”: a clear, structured source of key messaging that should populate everything from strategy decks and sales narratives to investor materials, web content, and internal communications.

And it is the organisational level narrative from which all your storytelling should build from.

The result is organisational coherence:

• Roadmaps, OKRs, and GTM plans can mesh naturally
• Product builds what GTM actually sells
• Operations scales workflows that reflect the real strategy
• Finance models the business the same way the organisation imagines it
• Investors can restate why you win after one meeting
• Marketing amplifies real value
• Customers experience one company, not five

Critically, it ensures that the right story travels behind the scenes — in boardrooms, investor conversations, partner discussions, and leadership forums — wherever meaning is formed and decisions are made.

Crafting your strategic narrative

It doesn’t start from a blank page, and it doesn’t require reinventing the wheel.

It is also not a creative process (and definitely not a “brainstorming” one) but one about business logic and causality.

We meet you where you are.

• We work with your strategy as it is right now, regardless of strategy model or framework you use, and no matter what shape or state it is in.
• We privilege causal logic. We facilitate a definitive understanding of how your business will operate and win: From vision-level to mission, value proposition through to operating model.

In practice, we:

• Surface the causal logic already present in your strategy
• Make implicit assumptions explicit
• Help you resolve any gaps in causal logic
• Synthesise the various elements of your strategy into one coherent narrative
• Build out that narrative so that teams can think with, and decide from; and
• Help you develop all the organisational storytelling that flows from it.

And that’s how we make your strategy coherent, narratable, and portable.

If you’d like to reach out for a no obligation chat, feel free.

You can book a discovery call or email me on michiel@narratology.house.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best,

— Michiel

 

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