The structure that enabled you will eventually constrain you

What ASML's restructuring reveals about how organisations grow into their own crises.

ASML cut 3,000 management roles at the peak of its success. The story being told is one of proactive efficiency, of ‘repairing the roof while the sun shines’. That framing isn’t wrong. But it misses the more important point: this was entirely predictable. Not in hindsight, but as a structural feature of how organisations grow. ASML didn’t fail into a crisis. It grew into it. And that distinction matters far beyond ASML.

Structure works. Until it doesn’t.

Organisations add structure to solve coordination problems. A founding team delegates to a first layer of management. A mid-sized company introduces planning and governance. A larger company organises into divisions, adds regional structures, builds matrix reporting lines. At each step, the structure works. It solves the problem in front of it.

The problem is that structure compounds. The coordination mechanisms that enabled growth at one stage become the primary source of friction at the next. Decisions slow. Meetings multiply. Engineers spend their time in alignment meetings rather than engineering.

Larry Greiner mapped this pattern in 1972, and it has held ever since. Every phase of organisational growth is enabled by a specific set of structures and practices, and every phase ends in a crisis caused by those same structures and practices outgrowing their usefulness. The solution to one crisis plants the seed of the next. Growth doesn’t produce bureaucracy as a failure. It produces it as a side effect of success.

ASML’s matrix wasn’t the mistake

Zooming back in on ASML: the matrix organisation wasn’t the problem. It was the solution, at the right moment, for the right reasons. When you’re coordinating thousands of engineers across multiple product lines and geographies, a matrix structure is a rational response to real complexity. It worked. The problem started when no one deliberately retired it.

This is where Greiner becomes uncomfortable. The structures that enable one phase of growth don’t announce when they’ve stopped being useful. They don’t break, they compound. The people who built them have authority and identity invested in them. And because the organisation is still growing and successful, the dysfunction remains invisible. ASML’s leadership has traced the current bureaucracy back 10 to 15 years. That’s not negligence. It’s what success looks like when it’s quietly building its own ceiling.

The diagnostic signal, when it finally surfaces, is specific. Engineers spend 35% of their time in coordination meetings rather than engineering. 4,500 management roles in a division of 16,000 people. These aren’t efficiency metrics, they are Greiner’s bureaucracy crisis rendered in numbers. The coordination has crossed the line from enabling work to displacing it.

Every organisation arrives here.

Every organisation that scales successfully, from a smaller SaaS or product company to a global innovator like ASML, will arrive at the same junction: the structures that enabled growth stop working, and innovation and productivity stall. The question is never whether this happens. It’s whether you see it coming.

Bezos saw it coming. Writing his ‘Day 1’ philosophy, he explicitly warned against the threat of an over-structured organisation sliding into Day 2: stasis, irrelevance and decline. Amazon saw an enemy and designed against it before it arrived. Even then, pressures returned. Amazon in 2023 restructured its management layers. Spotify did the same. The pattern doesn’t spare organisations that try to anticipate it, it just gives them a better chance of managing it on their own terms.

What distinguishes organisations is not avoiding the crisis. It’s whether they face it as a managed evolution, or as a trust crisis. That choice is made years earlier, not in the moment.

How would you know?

The uncomfortable question then is, how would you know if your organisation is already on this path? Greiner’s value isn’t that it tells you what to do. It’s that it tells you where to look. How much of your senior team’s time goes to coordination rather than creation? How many layers does a decision travel before it’s made? When did you last deliberately choose to retire a structure or process that used to work?

ASML’s engineers knew the answer to those questions. I assume they were just never asked until the dysfunction became impossible to ignore.

Organisations that navigate this well don’t do so because they are better managed. They do so because someone asked the question earlier.