Growth is often read as evidence of institutional strengthening. But there is a less comfortable middle stage: complexity increases before the organization has built all the capacities needed to sustain it.
More projects, more stakeholders, more resources and more people create new interfaces. Processes that used to be informal start producing rework. Decisions that worked through proximity begin to depend on governance. Information that used to fit in a few people's heads needs to become a system.
The challenge is not to add bureaucracy to an organization that works. It's to build capacity in proportion to the complexity it now carries.
That's why institutional development shouldn't start with the question “which area has a problem?”, but with another one: which capacities does the next stage require, and where might the relationships between them be limiting progress?