Startups thrive in chaos. Larger, more established organisations tend to fear it.
Startups possess a remarkable ability to make rapid, bold progress within a highly condensed timeframe. The question worth asking is whether the secret to unlocking innovation and pace in larger organisations lies in understanding how startups operate — and borrowing just enough of that productive disorder to create transformational results.
The reality for medium to large established players is that they have optimised for business as usual. Stakeholders and shareholders demand predictability and stability. With more people required to meet customer demands, more oversight, governance, and process are needed to ensure repeatable and predictable outputs. That stability ensures efficiency, but it also has a counter effect: it can stifle ambition, slow decision-making, and limit innovation.
What if medium to large-sized organisations, established players, and public bodies could borrow some of the chaos that fuels startup success? How could they introduce agility, experimentation, and controlled risk-taking without losing the stability that keeps them and their stakeholders comfortable?
Having worked with a number of startups in the tech and engineering sectors — advising them on their journeys and learning from them in equal measure — I’ve gained genuine insight into the thinking that enables small, resource-constrained teams to achieve outsized results.
The Hockey Stick Model
The hockey stick model represents the trajectory most startups follow: a period that starts slow with funds declining, struggles through uncertainty, and then, if successful, explodes into rapid expansion. It is this environment, more than any particular strategy, that shapes how startups think and work.
The model has three phases:
Flat Blade: Survival. These are the early days, and progress feels painfully slow. Startups are burning through investment capital to refine their products, search for product-market fit, and validate demand through rapid experimentation.
Inflection Point: Scaling or Stalling. Here, startups find their traction and begin to accelerate. Demand has been proven for the target customer pain points, and ideal customers are starting to pull, attracting more significant investment. This is also where startups fail — due to poor market fit, poor planning, not closing out risk fast enough, or prioritising vanity progress over substance.
Upward Stick: Growth and Return. When product-market fit and a usable product gain traction, scalable growth is locked in. Revenues start to surpass spending, making funding easier. This is where successful startups transition into scale-ups and, eventually, established players.
The journey fundamentally shapes the environment that fuels a startup’s ambition, decision-making, and pace. With a limited runway before funds run out, startups operate under intense pressure, creating a culture where urgency is not optional but essential. This urgency fuels innovation, forcing teams to move fast, experiment relentlessly, and pivot when necessary. Taking risks isn’t a choice; it’s survival. Without bold, data-driven bets, startups risk stagnation and failure. Agility becomes second nature, because decisions must be made quickly and bureaucracy is an unaffordable luxury. This high-stakes, fast-paced environment enables startups to break boundaries and achieve explosive growth.
Medium to large enterprises are configured for stability, efficiency, and risk minimisation, which are essential for maintaining business as usual, ensuring product quality, and protecting reputation. This structure often comes at a cost, though: slower decision-making, inefficient delivery, and diminished innovation capacity.
Organisations willing to learn from startups can adopt mindsets that enable bolder decision-making, accelerate execution, and unlock new opportunities. From my experience leading programmes and transformation initiatives, I’ve seen firsthand how applying startup-inspired principles can drive real impact.
Create a Culture of Experimentation
Startups don’t wait for perfect conditions. They test, learn, and refine rapidly, seeing failure not as an endpoint but a critical learning opportunity. This agility allows them to pivot and adapt in ways that traditional businesses often struggle to match.
Larger organisations can foster this mindset by adopting rapid prototyping, small-scale sprints or pilots, and iterative development. The goal is to create safe spaces for experimentation where failure is de-risked and viewed as a stepping stone to innovation.
BAe Systems has embraced additive manufacturing (3D printing) in developing its Tempest combat air demonstrator. By integrating 3D printing technologies, they have accelerated the design and manufacturing process, allowing for rapid prototyping and iterative testing. This approach speeds up development and reduces costs associated with traditional manufacturing methods.
Empower Small, Agile Teams
Startups move fast because they decentralise decision-making, allowing teams to take ownership and execute quickly. Many larger organisations, by contrast, suffer from overly layered approvals and excessive governance that slow progress.
Building curated, cross-functional teams with genuine autonomy and accountability is one of the most effective ways to foster agility. Decision-making should be pushed deeper into the organisation rather than concentrated at the top.
Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works is a well-known example: it developed cutting-edge aerospace technology at unprecedented speeds by bypassing traditional corporate bottlenecks while maintaining quality and security standards.
Adopt a “Fail Fast, Fail Safe, Learn Faster” Mindset
Startups accept failure as a fundamental part of success. Fail fast doesn’t mean failing recklessly. It means designing controlled experiments where failures are low-cost yet deliver high learning.
To reframe failure as a stepping stone to progress, organisations must encourage risk-taking in controlled environments, with planned mechanisms for capturing and applying what is learned. This requires strong leadership to create a safe environment for the workforce to engage with. Small, focused teams using structured experiments can limit downside risks while maximising insights, allowing expectations to be managed throughout.
Google X operates as a “moonshot factory,” testing ambitious ideas including self-driving cars and delivery drones. Projects that fail are intentionally ended early to free up resources for the next significant opportunity.
Shorten Decision Cycles
Speed is a survival mechanism for startups; they cannot afford months of deliberation. Large organisations must rethink decision-making to compete at the pace of change.
Reducing unnecessary bureaucracy, using real-time data to inform faster decisions, and deploying tools such as decision frameworks, risk-based approvals, and data-driven governance all help. Setting ambitious but clear timelines creates a pressured environment that drives shorter cycles — though this must be done in context with the business operation, as overloading people is a genuine risk.
As David Marquet outlined in Turn the Ship Around, empowering teams with control and responsibility rather than issuing top-down orders drives faster and smarter decisions. The partnership between Siemens Energy and Rolls-Royce SMR to supply turbine systems for small modular reactors is a relevant example: by streamlining decision-making and fostering close collaboration, both organisations have worked to accelerate deployment timelines and enhance efficiency.
Conclusion
Startups and established organisations are fundamentally different by design. Startups thrive in chaos, operating under extreme pressure where every decision, every risk, and every pivot determines survival. This environment fuels bold thinking, rapid execution, and breakthrough innovation. Larger organisations are built for stability, optimising for predictability, efficiency, and risk management — critical for sustaining operations, but often at the cost of agility and innovation.
These two worlds are not mutually exclusive. Organisations that embrace elements of the startup mindset — urgency, experimentation, and fast decision-making — can reignite their ability to innovate, unlock new opportunities, and remain competitive.
At the same time, startups scaling into maturity must learn from established organisations. Growth brings complexity, and without some degree of structure, governance, and operational discipline, even the most innovative startups risk losing momentum. The challenge is to embrace stability without losing the edge, ensuring that hard-won progress fuels the next wave of innovation rather than stifling it.
The best organisations, whether disruptive startups or established industry leaders, recognise that chaos and stability are not opposites. They are partners in progress. Learning when to trade one for the other is the key to sustained innovation, growth, and long-term success.
by Stuart Gorman
