Fighting the Current: How Smart Organizations Combat Social Entropy at Every Life Stage - Part 1
In our work with organizations across sectors—from scrappy nonprofits to established government agencies—I've observed a persistent challenge that few leaders talk about directly. It's the invisible force that causes well-intentioned teams to drift apart, clear communication to become muddled, and strong cultures to slowly erode. Scientists call it entropy, but in organizational life, I think of it as "fighting the current."
Just as a river naturally flows toward the sea, organizations naturally drift toward disorder without constant, intentional effort to maintain their coherence. This isn't a failure of leadership—it's physics applied to human systems. The question isn't whether your organization will face entropy, but how you'll respond to it at each stage of your journey.
Understanding the Current
Social entropy manifests differently depending on your organizational lifecycle stage. Organizations move through predictable phases—birth, growth, maturity, decline, and either renewal or death—and each brings unique challenges. (See the Speakman organizational life cycle.)
In the birth stage, entropy shows up as chaos and unclear roles. Everyone's excited about the mission, but communication happens in hallway conversations that half the team misses. During growth, what worked for five people breaks down at twenty-five. New hires don't understand the culture, and decision-making becomes sluggish. Mature organizations face bureaucracy and silos—that startup energy becomes "that's not how we do things here." Without intervention, maturity slides into decline.
Tools for Every Current
The good news? We're not powerless. The key is matching your strategy to your lifecycle stage.
Birth Stage: Build the Foundation
Your primary tools are ritual, documentation, and mentorship. Establish founding rituals that reinforce core values—how you start meetings or the stories you tell about why you exist. Document everything that works because you'll need to scale it later. Invest heavily in onboarding so new people understand not just what to do, but why and how you do things.
Growth Stage: Scale Without Breaking
Growth requires different tools. Create multiple communication channels—formal, informal, and digital systems that don't rely on any single person. Implement continuous improvement frameworks to systematically refine rapidly evolving processes. Regular alignment meetings create predictable moments to course-correct before small issues become big problems.
Maturity Stage: Fight Stagnation
Build renewal mechanisms into your DNA—term limits, mandatory strategic reviews, sabbaticals that bring fresh perspectives. Feedback loops and measurement systems become critical early warning signals. Network analysis can help identify where silos are forming. Sometimes the problem isn't people; it's structure creating barriers.
Decline and Renewal: Radical Intervention
Organizations in decline need intensive intervention. Learning organization principles become lifelines for rebuilding change capacity. Return to founding rituals—recommit to core purpose while changing everything else. (NOTE: In some situations it makes sense to sunset an organization that has served its purpose. The key here is to do so out of intention and purpose, not because entropy went unchecked.)
The Dynamic Discipline
Here's what I've learned: the same tool serves different purposes at different stages. Documentation captures founding wisdom early, becomes knowledge management later, and provides historical context for renewal efforts.
The mistake leaders make is treating anti-entropy work as a one-time intervention rather than ongoing discipline. It's not enough to have a great strategic retreat every three years. Organizations that thrive build entropy resistance into regular rhythms—weekly check-ins that surface small problems, quarterly culture surveys, annual strategic reviews that force difficult conversations, and intentional strategy and succession planning.
Your Next Steps
Where does your organization sit in its lifecycle, and what current are you fighting? Start by honestly assessing where entropy shows up. Communication breakdown? Role confusion? Loss of innovation capacity?
Then match your intervention to your stage. Birth-stage organizations need strong foundations. Growing organizations need scalable systems. Mature organizations require renewal mechanisms. Organizations in decline need renewal strategies that connect to mission and purpose.
Remember, fighting organizational entropy isn't about returning to some imagined golden age of perfect order. (As if such a thing ever existed.) It's about maintaining dynamic stability that allows your mission to thrive in a changing world. The current will always be there—the question is whether you'll build systems to navigate it successfully.
Ultimately, recognizing and responding to social entropy is essential for organizational health. By aligning your efforts with your lifecycle stage, you can create lasting impact even when the only constant is change itself.