Scaling without losing coherence

Author: Tessie Catsambas

One of the great tests of growth is whether an organization can expand without losing the clarity and coherence that made its impact possible in the first place.

I saw this vividly when EnCompass was selected to evaluate the rapid global scale-up of UN Women’s organizational structure. It gave me a front-row seat to a challenge many leaders eventually face: how do you redesign for scale while protecting the purpose, culture, and shared direction that helped the organization take root?

Clearly, UN Women was growing successfully. The question was whether its structure was evolving in a way that positioned it to deliver on its mandate across diverse contexts: advancing gender equality and women’s economic empowerment around the world.

What stood out to me most was the importance of coherence. At scale, success depends on more than meeting expansion targets. It depends on how well an organization connects central strategy, shared learning, and local action. It depends on whether people across levels and geographies can make decisions that are informed by the organization’s knowledge, aligned with its purpose, and responsive to the realities on the ground.

That is a design issue.

When organizations grow quickly, fragmentation becomes a real risk. Different parts of the system can begin solving for their own immediate needs. Local adaptation becomes disconnected from enterprise learning. Strategy and implementation drift apart. And what once felt like a shared organizational logic starts to thin.

The answer is not tighter control for its own sake. It is not forcing sameness across very different contexts. The deeper task is to build the structures, relationships, and decision pathways that allow local action to stay connected to shared purpose and organizational wisdom.

That was one of the most important lessons I carried from that work: scaling well requires more than reach. It requires coherence.

For leaders working at scale, this becomes a defining question: how do you make sure local decisions are informed by what the organization knows, shaped by what the mission requires, and still flexible enough to meet the moment where people are?

That is the kind of growth challenge that interests me most. Not simply how organizations get bigger, but how they grow in ways that preserve what matters, strengthen what connects them, and build wisely for the complexity ahead.