It was a simple but astonishing revelation for me: you must repeatedly share your ideas to fully convey your message and have them ascribed to you. To be seen as the owner of a set of ideas and principles, you have to repeatedly mention, at any level, with the same level of commitment and excitement. Seeing that made me realize how fragile the fabric of shared consciousness uniting a group of people is, and how it needs to be augmented continuously. Another counterintuitive phenomenon was to see how rationality calls for more rationality up until a point where demand exceeds the supply. People mostly want their decision-makers to be rational, and rational people perform especially well in the tech world. So, as someone building a team, you’d like to pick rational individuals to work with you. Yet, the more rationality you add to the mix, the more you raise the bar, and you are required to be more rational in return.

Without rational thinking, factions quickly form and unity dissolves as individuals drift toward fabricating their own reality. The corroding effect it radiates takes its toll on teams, factions begin to pull their networks towards different directions, instead of going forward collectively, which may manifest itself in action paralysis. Results start to take more time, and more effort is poured in as a solution, yet nothing changes. Individuals get frustrated, and the complaints about poor management become palpable, finally, the management either chooses to drop some projects to get airlift or decides to start the projects all over. All, in a way, is caused by a decreasing level of rationality density.

This problem is extra lethal for scale-up companies. At first, the vision is clear, the road is linear: one product, one business model. The matters to be rational about are limited. Everyone toils, solutions are designed and business clicks. But after a while, when things become a bit more complex business-wise, as different product lines and revenue streams are built, dissolvement emerges at the slightest drop in rationality. When the why behind becomes more and more obscure, where decision-makers start putting less emphasis on communicating their guiding ideas and principles, teams pivot to their operator modes, losing interest in why some things have to be built. In a startup, where headcount is low and therefore finding the root cause of a comms problem is relatively easy, the loss may not bleed an organisation dead. On the other end of the spectrum, at a mature company, the U-turn may be less painful as the company has notable weight and can take in some punches. Yet, at a scale-up, where the pressure of shipping products is immense and the organisational structure has not been in its strongest form, a comm problem could easily be overlooked up until a point where no easy rollback is likely.

As shared consciousness within a team and between teams fades, subgroups start to act on their own for what they think is the best, and it starts to have a sensible dragging effect for a scale-up. To make things worse, this is one of those situations which has to be diagnosed early, because otherwise the options for treatment are quite limited. It would result in disbanding teams and forming new ones, which is the hardest brake you can put on a scale-up trying to prove its core ideas are still sound at different scales. Thus, contrary to common belief, the duty of explaining “whys” becomes no less but more paramount as each day passes in the lifetime of an organisation. Many executives find this duty a bit dull as they commonly think that it’s all clear all the time, but, the higher the capacity of teams, the more compelling and rational your narrative should become to keep the focus in place.

The irony is clear: as teams grow more capable, leaders must work harder to explain their reasoning. In scale-ups, where talent runs high and complexity runs deeper, rational decisions aren’t enough—they must be rationalised, repeatedly. The more intellectual firepower you add, the more energy you must spend making sense of it all. Perhaps the most rational act is knowing when pure rationality isn’t enough.