The Culture Spiral of Impact-Driven Organizations

July 17, 2025

1. You create an amazing company that is “impact-focused”. Individuals feel aligned to company outcomes: growing the company = personal + professional success.

2. The company is taking off and entering hypergrowth. It's working!

3. Growth stalls. It can feel like nothing is working at the company. The “rocketship” era is on pause.

4. This prolongs. People feel like their work stops being impactful to the top line of the company because they keep working hard but nothing seems to be taking off.

5. You still haven't exited the "lull". Growth continues to stall.

6. Two things happen simultaneously, exacerbating company culture issues:

   1. The zealots -- people who are most fanatical about the company's growth prospects, and often your highest performers -- feel disempowered. They're banging their head against a wall. They begin to leave.

   2. Other people, who perhaps are more self-interested, come to the conclusion that the only way to achieve professional success is not to grow the company, but to find creative ways to satisfy their personal incentives. This might mean making up "complex but unimpactful projects for their next promo", "hostage-like" demands, or "politics".

7. Come time for performance evaluations, you still try to keep your “impact-focus” as a company. But because very few things are truly impactful for the company, evaluations across the board become increasingly subjective.

   1. You are bound to make mistakes in this subjective judgment. Your mistakes are misconstrued as “mental gymnastics” to your team.

8. Executive visibility eventually becomes increasingly important, because of the rise of subjective evaluations. People begin optimizing for this: often the wrong thing.

9. Executive visibility turns into disempowerment of decisionmaking. People begin punting decisions upwards.

10. This spiral further stalls growth.