Can Your System Withstand Growth Without Breaking?

A system that only works in good weather is not a system; it’s a rehearsal.

In agriculture, you don’t just plant and hope. You test the soil and ask, Can it support new crops?  Will it retain moisture under heat? Does it erode easily?

But in business, we rarely test our systems that way. We build SOPs, hire people, launch tools, and assume we’re ready for the next phase.  Until something unexpected hits, like a sudden scale spike, a team shuffle, or a key client shift. And the system, despite its polish, buckles because it was never tested in anything but good weather.

The real resilience check

Over the last three articles, we’ve covered:

• Smooth systems turning brittle (Rahul’s cement trap)

• Emotional subsidies that keep systems falsely stable (my little dig at founders everywhere)

• Tech tools showing up without design clarity (Karna’s tools moment)

So what’s left? - The soil test, or that quiet but firm audit of:

• Can our system hold when the rhythm breaks?

• Do we rely on “superstar individuals” or sustainable flows?

• Do our processes adapt, or do they only work when life cooperates?

This isn’t a dramatic transformation but a durability scan.

A tale of two launches

One of our clients, a logistics tech firm, was expanding from two cities to four.

With the same SOPs, software, and people, city A was successful; however, there was chaos in city B. The reason: In city A, the local team had created invisible buffers:

• A dispatcher who doubled as a quick trainer

• A shared doc where odd delivery cases were logged

• A morning huddle that wasn’t in the handbook

City B did everything by the book — and that was the problem. They followed the system, but unlike City A, they never enriched the soil.

Before you run the soil test

Before you run the test, you must ask, Are you willing to see what you’ve ignored? Because many founders don’t want a soil test, they want validation. They want someone to say, "Yes, your system is strong." But here’s the truth: the strongest systems we’ve seen were never confident; they were curious. They didn’t wait for friction to appear; they simulated and welcomed it. They had rituals like:

• "What did we patch last week that we haven’t fixed?"

• "Where are we pretending we have a fallback, but in reality, we just have Amol?"

• "If we grow 10X, what snaps first?"

These aren’t strategy questions — they’re questions of humility. Because the hard truth is this: growth doesn’t break systems; it exposes what was never built into them. That’s your real soil test … not how fast the plant grows, but whether the roots knew how to spread without being told. Only after that do you run the test. You don’t need a strategy offsite or a dashboard upgrade. You need friction.

1. Simulate stress without real damage.

Ask: “What happens if our top 2 performers go on leave together?”

2. Strip away the tools for a day.

See what your system knows, what your people remember, and what gets lost.

3. Interview your edge cases.

Find that one operations executive who knows 17 workarounds and that account manager who adjusted the script for a fussy client. Document their knowledge.

4. Swap two roles temporarily.

Just for 48 hours. Let the cracks emerge. Then fix the system, not the people.

Resilience is a system trait, not a team trait.

Too often, we say, "That team is strong," "She handles everything." But we forget that the real test of resilience isn’t how well a person copes but whether the system absorbs the hit. Resilient systems don’t panic when one part fails, offer fallback flows without permission, or even let teams rest without guilt. That’s the soil you want, because what you plant next depends entirely on what you’ve been quietly enriching.

One Last Question to Carry Forward

If nothing changed in your business for the next 3 months … no crises, no hires, no fires … would your system still improve? If the answer is no, then the soil is dry. It’s not feeding your future but just holding your present.

Let’s change that.

(The author is Co-founder at PPS Consulting and a business operations advisor. She helps businesses across sectors and geographies improve execution through global best practices. She could be reached at rashmi@ppsconsulting.biz)