Larry Greiner mapped six crises every growing business hits, back in 1972, and businesses are still hitting every single one of them, in roughly the same order, on schedule.
- Greiner’s model says growth doesn’t happen smoothly. It happens in phases, each ending in a specific, predictable crisis that only the next phase’s structure can resolve.
- You can’t skip a crisis by working harder inside the current phase. The crisis is the signal that the current structure has reached its limit, not that the team isn’t trying hard enough.
- Most businesses correctly diagnose that something is broken and incorrectly assume it’s a performance problem instead of a structural one.
Greiner’s Six Phases, Plainly
Greiner’s core insight, translated out of 1970s management-journal language: growth happens in phases, and each phase is ended by a specific crisis that the current way of running the business cannot solve. You don’t out-hustle your way past it. You have to change the structure.
- Creativity ends in a crisis of leadership — informal, founder-driven energy stops being enough, and someone actually has to manage.
- Direction ends in a crisis of autonomy — the people closest to customers know things head office doesn’t, and aren’t allowed to act on it.
- Delegation ends in a crisis of control — leaders realise they’ve handed out so much authority they’ve lost visibility into what’s actually happening.
- Coordination ends in a crisis of red tape — the systems built to regain control now strangle the speed that made the business work in the first place.
- Collaboration ends in a crisis of internal growth — the informal, culture-driven coordination that got you this far runs out of capacity to hold a bigger business together.
- Alliances — the phase Greiner added in his later work, where growth increasingly depends on partnerships, networks, and external moves rather than anything purely internal.
Every one of these crises looks, from the inside, like a performance problem. People aren’t communicating. Sales isn’t hitting target. Nobody’s accountable for X. It’s rarely a people problem. It’s a structure that has reached the edge of what it was built to handle.
Greiner's six growth phases, and the crisis marking the end of each one.
Which Growth Crisis Are You In?
Look at where the complaints cluster, not at who’s making them. A crisis of autonomy sounds like frustrated regional or frontline staff. A crisis of control sounds like leadership blindsided by a number they should have seen coming. A crisis of red tape sounds like your best people quietly job-hunting because decisions that used to take a day now take three weeks. The complaint tells you which phase you’re exiting; the fix is almost never “try harder within the current structure.”
Growth doesn’t fail businesses. The next crisis arrives on schedule whether you’re ready for it or not.
Where Greiner’s Model Undersells Modern Scaling
Greiner wrote this in 1972, describing large industrial organisations evolving over decades. Modern scaling businesses compress his six phases into quarters, not decades — and here’s what the original model doesn’t quite capture: different functions inside the same business often sit in different phases at the same time. Your sales team might already be deep in a crisis of control while product is still stuck in a crisis of leadership. Greiner’s model was built for one org moving through one sequence. An operator’s job today is diagnosing four or five simultaneous, staggered sequences and sequencing the fixes without breaking whichever function is closest to its own edge.
If you’re solving this quarter’s crisis with more effort instead of more structure, you’re setting up next quarter’s crisis too.
Growth doesn’t fail businesses. The next crisis arrives on schedule whether you’re ready for it or not — and the businesses that get hurt aren’t the ones that hit a crisis, they’re the ones that spend two quarters treating a structural problem as a motivation problem.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Greiner’s growth model?
Greiner’s model, first published in 1972, describes business growth as a series of phases, each ending in a specific crisis that can only be resolved by changing the organisation’s structure, not by working harder inside the existing one.
Do businesses always go through the crises in order?
Broadly yes for a single function, but in fast-scaling modern businesses, different functions such as sales, product, and operations often sit in different phases simultaneously, which the original model didn’t account for.
How do you know which crisis you’re actually in?
Look at where complaints and friction cluster. Frustrated frontline staff who feel unheard usually points to a crisis of autonomy; leadership blindsided by numbers points to a crisis of control. A structured Curve Diagnostic removes the guesswork.
Related reading: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There and The Second Curve.
If you can see your business in more than one of these crises at once, that’s normal — and it’s exactly what the Curve Diagnostic is built to untangle.
Take the Curve Diagnostic