"We're all just muddling through, after all. We're all just doing the best we can. We're all struggling with our struggles. Nobody has the answers. And everybody, deep down, is a little bit lost," said Katherine Center.
How does your organisation really work? In delighting the customer, does the operational and financial data just flow in, magically showing stunning performance on a colourful Power BI dashboard? Perfectly planned, is everyone in sync, engaged, fired up, certain they are doing the right thing, working in faultless harmony?
The reality of the corporate world is that most companies survive not through flawless, visionary execution, but by muddling through. Daily operations are more trial and error, reacting to crises, and managing internal friction, rather than operating with perfect, long-term strategic clarity.
No, not every company is meant to live forever. Inevitably, creative destruction, survival of the fittest, happens. But often an early corporate death can be stopped by a health check asking different questions, and rethinking fundamental assumptions.
Helps to be aware, looking out for the warning signs. Behind the hype, all the polished public relations and mission statements, there is a messy reality that shows up in several ways.
In the beginning, one starts with relentless hustle and an insightful core idea. But as the months and years go by, as companies scale, they often fail to upgrade their thinking and systems.
What worked once, the founder's hands-on approach can become a roadblock, forcing staff to just 'figure it out' as they go. 'Disjointed incrementalism, the fancy term for flying by the seat of your pants, becomes standard operating procedure.
Being simple in design is difficult; being complex and confusing is easy. Often, companies try to manage complexity by adding layers of bureaucracy, meetings, and processes. The result is 'approval theatre' where the system stresses control over traction, and true progress gets bogged down.
Slow downhill descent
In the business history of Kenya and East Africa, rarely does a major company collapse in a single, dramatic moment. Instead, they manage failure quietly, slowly downsizing, restructuring, or pivoting, suggesting that each is a carefully thought-out, deliberate move.
Muddling through is a remarkably resilient approach, but with time, it drains staff energy and makes the business highly vulnerable to sudden shifts in the market.
No company announces its decline outright. There is never a corporate communication that says: "We miscalculated, the model doesn't work, and we're running out of options." Instead, failing organisations communicate in subtler ways.
Like the decline and fall of the Roman empire—that happened over centuries—deterioration shows up quietly in odd decisions, behaviour shifts, and the quiet contradictions between 'what they say and what they do'.
Helps to start to recognise the signs. Not the dramatic collapses, but the slow erosion that trickles down. When a business is failing, senior management will generally insist everything is fine.
Fear of being wrong, being afraid of risking stepping out of line, deleting institutional memory, and slowness in responding are all warning signals. Nothing wrong with having a long-term vision. But when the stress is on some heavenly future, rather than down to earth tangible results, that is a red flag.
Bold move or buying time?
One indicator may be that they start changing the rules. "One of the earliest signs of trouble is constant restructuring disguised as 'evolution'. Pricing models change. Compensation shifts.
Core features are removed, paywalled, or quietly deprioritised. What was once positioned as the heart of the product is suddenly optional, deprecated, or reframed as a 'test'. Users and workers are asked to adapt—again— often with little notice and even less explanation.
These changes are rarely presented as corrections. They're labelled bold moves, strategic realignments, or exciting new directions. When a company keeps rewriting the rules instead of improving the system, it's usually not innovating. It's buying time and shifting the cost of that uncertainty onto the people who rely on it, advises Christine Lorelie.
"Healthy businesses talk about outcomes. Failing ones talk about potential. When performance starts slipping, the language shifts. Conversations move away from measurable results and toward mission statements, values, community, and long-term impact. These things are important, but they're also conveniently abstract. Vision becomes something to hide behind when the numbers no longer speak for themselves," says Lorelie.
'Muddling through' was formalised as a term and theory by the economist and political scientist Charles Lindblom in a seminal 1959 paper, The Science of Muddling Through.
Lindblom observed that in practice, incremental decision-making was the rule in the US government bureaucracy. Instead of making massive, perfectly planned reforms, public policy makers and organisations make small, step-by-step policy adjustments in response to immediate problems. What really happens is the act of solving problems pragmatically as they come, rather than executing a flawless long-term strategy.
Muddling through is a popular item on the management menu, but a constant daily diet isn't healthy. What's the treatment? Astute advice comes from Melinda French Gates: "The most important thing you can do is keep learning and stay open to change."
