The Hidden Trap of Growing Too Smoothly

Part 1: Success ≠ Sustainability Series

Smooth operations can feel like success … but they often hide a slow freeze. 

Do you know what’s amusing about Indian businesses? We dream of order and chase stability. And when the chaos finally settles, when the team is working, customers are happy, and processes are humming, we do something dangerous; we stop moving.

It’s not failure that holds us back, but comfort. That quiet sense of “everything’s fine” becomes the trap. It’s a story playing out across growing teams, especially in SMEs, where progress pauses the moment things begin to run smoothly.

Because when success first arrives, it doesn’t knock; it whispers, "Don’t change anything. It’s working."

Cement where there was clay

Every founder, senior manager, or team lead has lived through early chaos‒delivery dates missed, staff improvising, and spreadsheets that run the business. Every new system brings relief. But systems are like clay; they’re meant to be shaped as things evolve.

The real danger is they often turn to cement. That onboarding checklist you built in 2022? It’s still being used today, even though your team size has doubled and your customers look nothing like they did then.

That workflow between sales and ops? It made sense when you had 5 reps. Now you have 15 … And yet, it’s sacred. What once felt like clarity slowly becomes rigidity.

A story from the middle

Last year, I met a third-generation manufacturing business in Nagpur. Their packaging division had scaled fast post-COVID, thanks to a new B2B channel. They’d invested in software, hired mid-managers, and even set up a cross-functional task force.

Things ran like a machine until they didn’t.

Newer product lines had longer lead times. One customer brought in custom SKUs. And suddenly, the smooth system cracked:

• Orders were fulfilled late.

• Team leaders avoided escalation.

• Everyone assumed someone else was fixing the glitch.

The culprit wasn’t laziness or bad tech; it was the belief that "our system works" and that "this isn’t chaos; rather, it’s just a bad month." But really, they were experiencing what I call the cement trap when yesterday’s systems become today’s blind spots.

Why this happens so often

In Indian SMEs, loyalty and jugaad often make up for a lack of structure in the early stages. But once things click, a kind of reverence sets in:

• "This workflow saved us during GST chaos."

• ·  "This format was built by my most trusted guy."

• "This vendor list has served us since 2018."

So we hesitate to update, or worse, we pretend not to see the cracks. But scale, like nature, needs pruning. Left untouched, even the best-designed processes start to decay. And because these systems don’t collapse overnight, we delay. Until one day, the thing that brought us stability becomes the thing holding us back.

A quick self-check

Whether you’re a founder, a CXO, or just the person who “keeps things running”, ask yourself:

• What’s a system you haven’t touched in 12 months?

• Where are team members following the process but silently suffering?

• Which ‘saviour tool’ is now making everyone’s job harder?

If you end up with “we’ll revisit it after the next quarter”, you’re in cement territory.

The invisible system behind the system

There’s one idea we’ve seen again and again in our work with growing Indian businesses:

Every smooth system creates an invisible meta-system – a set of unspoken habits, assumptions, and silences that sit beneath the surface.

We call this the Fallback Loop. It happens when people stop evolving a system because it once saved them. Instead of updating it, they just work around it. Or worse, protect it. The team doesn’t push back, the founder doesn’t re-question, and new hires inherit but never challenge. And suddenly, the loop is locked.

So what’s the antidote?

You don’t need to break everything; you just need to breathe life back into your systems.

Here’s how:

• Schedule success reviews, not just failure retros.

• Time-box each system’s expiry: "Let’s assume this SOP lasts 6 months."

• Nominate a rotating sceptic … someone to question the sacred cows every quarter

Most importantly, make it cultural. In healthy teams, improvement isn’t a fix. It’s a ritual.

Remember, success is not the end of chaos. Sometimes, it’s the beginning of complacency.

(The author is a co-founder at PPS Consulting. He is a business transformation consultant. He could be reached at rahul@ppsconsulting.biz.)