Rapid Growth: Leading with Vision, Scaffolding, and Empathy

Created by Sarah Choi (prompt writer using ChatGPT)

Leading with Vision, Scaffolding, and Empathy

Rapid growth is thrilling—and disorienting. Momentum compounds, expectations accelerate, and the cost of indecision rises. In these seasons, leaders are asked to do two things at once: protect the core promise that attracted people in the first place, and redesign the airplane while it’s leaving the runway. This article offers a practical approach to what to do when rapid growth hits: how to make decisions that act as scaffolding rather than concrete, how to stay true to the vision while changing what needs to change, how to communicate with honesty and empathy when results get messy or teams feel confused, and how to hold the paradox of sticking to the plan and dropping the plan—sometimes on the same day.

1) When Rapid Growth Arrives: Stabilize, Then Expand

Begin with triage. Before you optimize anything, protect the essentials: the promise to your users or audience, the health of your team, the quality bar that keeps trust. Stabilization is not a slowdown—it’s how you speed up without breaking.

Stabilize the demand side. Clarify who you serve first. Decide which channels, customers, or audiences receive priority routing. Establish a single queue for inbound work, with a visible “priority of record” so every team can align to the same list.

Stabilize the supply side. Define the minimum stable team topology for the current load. Assign clear owners for the top three value streams (e.g., onboarding, support, delivery). Name deputies for each owner to de-risk bottlenecks and vacations. Reduce work-in-progress so the system flows.

Stabilize the cadence. Introduce a predictable operating rhythm: brief daily stand-ups to surface blockers; weekly stabilization sprints focused on unblocking flow and shoring up quality; monthly retrospectives aimed at structural fixes. Cadence is a safety rail when everything else is moving.

2) Scaffolding, Not Concrete: Designing Decisions That Can Evolve

In rapid growth, many choices should be temporary structures that help you climb while you build the final form. Scaffolding decisions are explicitly time-bound, reversible, and “fit-for-now.” They let you deliver value without locking the organization into brittle rules.

A simple way to design scaffolding is to use T‑BAR:

T — Temporary: Set a sunset or review date when the decision will be revisited.
B — Bounded: Limit scope (where it applies), duration, and the resources it can consume.
A — Accountable: Name an owner responsible for monitoring and adjusting the decision.
R — Reversible: Prefer options you can roll back with minimal collateral damage.

Examples:

A lightweight approval path for launches under a defined risk threshold, with a promise to replace it with fuller governance once the team doubles.
A “good-enough” runbook for support escalation that evolves every week as real cases arrive.
A naming convention or content taxonomy that covers 80% of cases, with a log of exceptions you’ll fold in later.

The point is not to settle for sloppiness; it is to sequence quality intelligently—laying temporary planks so you can cross the gap safely and pour the permanent foundation when the time is right.

3) Staying True to the Vision While Changing the Plan

Vision should be a north star, not a cage. A concise articulation helps every team make dozens of congruent choices per day without constant escalation. Pair the vision with a few guiding principles that translate aspiration into behavior.

A practical pattern is VPG—Vision, Principles, Guardrails:

Vision: A one-sentence promise that states who you serve and what changes for them.
Principles: 4–6 non-negotiable ways you create that change (e.g., “quality over novelty,” “clarity beats cleverness,” “accessibility is a feature”).
Guardrails: Quantitative or qualitative boundaries that prevent value erosion (e.g., maximum response times, minimum quality checks, privacy standards, brand tone).

With VPG, plans can flex as the facts change while the character of the work stays constant. When trade-offs emerge, test options against VPG: if an idea accelerates growth but violates a principle or breaches a guardrail, you either adapt the idea or decline it.

4) Decision-Making at Speed: Make It Visible, Make It Kind

Rapid growth often collapses decisions into hurried hallway chats. Bring decisions back into the light.

Name the decider and the input roles. Whether you favor RACI or DACI, publish who decides, who must be consulted, and who will be informed. Visibility lowers anxiety.
Adopt the 70% rule. Decide when you have about 70% of the information you’d like, and buy a reversible option if possible. Waiting for perfect data during a surge is often a hidden refusal to decide.
Keep a decision log. One page. Date, decision, rationale, owner, review date. This single artifact turns “messy” into “managed,” and it’s invaluable for new hires catching up.

Make your process kind by default: ask, “Who bears the risk of this decision?” and “Who does this surprise?” and then talk to those people before you finalize it.

5) Honest and Empathetic Communication When Things Get Messy

In seasons of rapid growth, errors and misalignments happen—even to excellent teams. Honesty builds trust; empathy keeps people engaged while they fix what’s broken.

Tell the whole truth. Share context, constraints, and the actual trade-offs you made. Use plain language: “We underestimated support volume by 40%. That’s on leadership. Here’s what we’re doing this week to stabilize.”

Acknowledge feelings before fixing facts. Confusion, fatigue, or frustration are data. Reflect them back—“I can see this change was confusing and cost you rework”—and then describe the next right step.

Communicate in layers. A concise all-hands note with the high-level story; team-specific briefs tailored to their impacts; office hours for questions. Repeat the same message through multiple channels and voices.

Make commitments small and visible. Replace vague assurances with dates, owners, and check-ins. Let the team see progress, and invite them to hold you to it.

6) Guiding Confused Teams Back to Clarity

Confusion is not failure; it’s a signal that the system outgrew its current explanations. Treat it with structure and care.

Re-anchor roles and interfaces. Publish a simple map of teams (or pods) and the handoffs between them. Name a single intake path for each value stream to avoid “side-door” requests.
Lower the cognitive load. Centralize the “source of truth” for priorities and definitions. If any term (e.g., “launch,” “Beta,” “Definition of Done”) has multiple meanings, pick one and write it down.
Coach through the chaos. Encourage managers to run brief 1:1s focused on energy, obstacles, and what each person needs this week. Confusion often dissipates when people feel seen and supported.

7) The Paradox: Stick to the Plan and Drop the Plan

The art of leading rapid growth lies in knowing when to persevere and when to pivot. The trick is to make these moments pre-decidable—to define the tripwires that tell you which stance to take.

When to stick to the plan:

The vision is sound and early turbulence reflects normal scaling pains.
Leading indicators (quality, retention, satisfaction) are either holding or recovering.
The alternative would violate your principles or dismantle a key guardrail.

When to drop the plan:

A guardrail is breached in a way that harms users, team well-being, or integrity.
The evidence contradicts the plan’s core assumptions, not just its schedule.
An equivalent or better path exists that is cheaper, kinder, or faster—and is reversible.

To keep this from becoming whiplash, set up branch plans in advance: “If X threshold is crossed, we pause Plan A and activate Plan B.” Celebrate not just launches, but also wise cancellations—graceful endings are a mark of maturity.

8) Managing Quality and Debt During the Surge

Growth amplifies both excellence and entropy. You will accumulate debt—not only technical debt, but also process, documentation, and decision debt. Name it, track it, and make steady payments.

Choose a quality bar you can keep. Write a clear Definition of Done for your core outputs (product releases, client deliverables, content). A consistent 8/10 beats sporadic 10/10 followed by exhaustion.
Maintain a debt register. Keep a visible list of shortcuts you’ve taken, with a target date and owner for remediation. Pay down a little every sprint.
Create tiger teams sparingly. When fires break out, form a small cross-functional group with authority to act, a daily update, and an explicit end date. Disband promptly to avoid creating a shadow org.

9) Scaling Culture: What Must Never Change, What Should Often Change

Every scale-up rewrites parts of its culture. Decide what is invariant and what is experimental. Invariants are the handful of behaviors you will protect at all costs (e.g., “we tell the truth fast,” “we do not trade dignity for speed,” “we protect focus time”). Experiments govern how you work today (meeting formats, sprint lengths, tool choices). Write both lists down. Review experiments monthly; defend invariants daily.

10) A 30–60–90 Day Leader’s Plan for Rapid Growth

Days 1–30: Stabilize and See Clearly. Clarify the value promise, cap work-in-progress, publish the VPG, and start a weekly stabilization sprint focused on flow and quality. Launch the decision log and debt register. Define the top three value streams and name owners with deputies. Communicate more than feels necessary; expect to repeat yourself.

Days 31–60: Build Scaffolding. Introduce T‑BAR decisions in the busiest areas (support, onboarding, ops). Stand up a single source of truth for priorities and definitions. Use data to refine guardrails. Run your first retrospective focused on structural improvements. Add branch plans for the two riskiest initiatives.

Days 61–90: Pour Selective Concrete. Replace the most brittle scaffolding with durable processes that have proven value. Simplify org interfaces where work gets stuck. Expand onboarding capacity. Continue paying down debt. Reaffirm cultural invariants and publish a short “ways of working” guide that reflects what’s actually working.

11) Common Pitfalls—and Their Antidotes

Premature concrete. Locking in complex policies too early. Antidote: T‑BAR, review dates, and reversible options.
Ceremony creep. Meetings multiplying without value. Antidote: Time-box, clear outcomes, and a monthly “meeting audit.”
Hero culture. A few people carrying too much. Antidote: Deputies, sustainable Definition of Done, and transparent workload views.
Invisible debt. Shortcuts forgotten. Antidote: Debt register, weekly micro-payments.
Priority fog. Competing lists across teams. Antidote: One backlog of record and a published priority sequence.

12) Closing Encouragement

Rapid growth is a vote of confidence from the world—and a heavy ask of every person involved. Lead with a clear promise, build the scaffolding that lets you keep that promise at scale, and keep kindness at the center of your communication. Some days you will carry forward exactly as planned; other days you will change course in the moment. Both can be acts of fidelity to the vision. If you keep listening, keep learning, and keep telling the truth, the organization will not only grow fast—it will grow well.