Your Team Isn’t Broken, It’s Boiling

In the 1980s and 1990s, physicist Per Bak developed a revolutionary theory while studying sand piles. He watched as grains of sand dropped one by one onto a flat surface, forming a cone. For a while, each grain simply rolled down and found its place. But then something fascinating happened. The pile reached a critical state where a single grain could trigger either nothing at all or a massive avalanche that reshaped the entire structure.

Bak had discovered what he called “self-organized criticality”—the idea that complex systems naturally evolve toward a critical state where small changes can have dramatically different outcomes. Published in his 1996 book “How Nature Works,” this theory revolutionized how we understand everything from earthquakes to stock markets to forest fires. But what Bak perhaps didn’t realize was that he’d also perfectly described what happens inside growing technology organizations.

Every CTO’s organization exists somewhere on this spectrum. Sometimes we’re in a stable state where changes flow smoothly. Other times, we’re at that critical point where one more feature request, one more hire, or one more process could trigger either breakthrough innovation or complete organizational collapse.

When Everything That Works Stops Working

I’m sitting across from Sarah, the CEO of a rapidly growing fintech startup. It’s 7 PM on a Thursday, and we’re the last ones in the office, not because we’re workaholics, but because we need the quiet to have this conversation. Her company has grown from 15 to 75 people in eighteen months. The energy that once flowed through their open office has been replaced by something else. Something harder to define.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Sarah says, rubbing her temples. “We used to ship features every week. Now it takes us a month just to agree on requirements. And when we finally deploy, something always breaks.”

I’ve seen this before. Many times. Her engineering team isn’t failing, they’re experiencing a phase change.

The moment of realization comes when Sarah shows me their engineering metrics. Deploy frequency: down 70%. Incident rate: up 300%. Team satisfaction scores: plummeting. But here’s what really catches my attention, their codebase has only grown by 40%.

“Look at this,” I point to the screen. “Your technical complexity hasn’t exploded. Your team size has tripled, but that alone shouldn’t cause this level of dysfunction.”

Sarah leans forward. “So what is it?”

That’s when I draw three circles on the whiteboard. “Your organization is like water,” I tell her. “And right now, you’re boiling.”

The Three States of Your Engineering Organization

Sarah’s organization has all the hallmarks of a boiling system. Decisions ricochet between teams with no clear owner. The product team makes promises that engineering can’t keep. Sales commits to features that don’t exist. Everyone is moving fast, but in different directions. The very energy that fueled their early growth has become destructive chaos.

“We tried to fix it,” Sarah explains. “We added more process. Approval gates. Architecture reviews. Change advisory boards.”

I wince. “And?”

“Now nothing moves at all. We went from chaos to… paralysis.”

She’s describing the other extreme: a frozen system. In their panic to control the boiling chaos, they’ve overcorrected. Now every decision requires five approvals. Innovation has stopped. The best engineers are already updating their resumes.

“Here’s what most leaders don’t understand,” I explain. “Organizations don’t gradually slow down. They undergo phase changes, just like water turning to ice or steam. The key is recognizing the early warning signs.”

We spend the next two hours mapping out the symptoms:

Signs of approaching boiling point:

Increasing “emergency” requests that bypass normal channels
More people in meetings than doing actual work
Decisions being revisited multiple times
Cross-team dependencies creating cascading delays

Signs of approaching freezing point:

Multiple approval layers for simple changes
Teams waiting on other teams before they can start
Innovation replaced by compliance theater
Fear of making decisions without explicit permission

“The goal,” I tell Sarah, “is to maintain a liquid state, structured enough to flow efficiently, flexible enough to adapt.”

The Path Back to Flow

Three months later, Sarah calls me with an update. They’ve implemented what we discussed: team boundaries that reduce dependencies, automation that eliminates manual coordination, and a decision framework that pushes authority down to the teams.

“We’re shipping weekly again,” she says. “But more importantly, it feels sustainable. We’re not running hot anymore. We’re… flowing.”

Their metrics tell the story: deployment frequency up 400% from the frozen state, incidents down 60% from the boiling point. But the real victory? Their employee satisfaction scores have returned to startup-level highs.

Why Phase Changes Are Your Hidden Productivity Killer

Technology organizations don’t experience gradual performance degradation but rather they undergo sudden phase changes between liquid (flowing), frozen (rigid), and boiling (chaotic) states. CTOs who recognize these phase transitions early can take deliberate action to maintain the productive liquid state where teams deliver consistently while adapting to change.

Your organization’s productivity isn’t determined by your tech stack or your process methodology. It’s determined by which phase your system is in. Research from the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team has consistently shown that high-performing teams deploy more frequently with lower failure rates. But what they’re really measuring is organizational flow state.

Traditional management approaches treat symptoms, not causes. When delivery slows, we hire more developers. When quality drops, we add more process. But if you’re in the wrong phase, these solutions make things worse. Studies of organizational change consistently show that the majority of transformations fail not because of technology, but because organizations can’t navigate the complexity transitions that growth brings.

The High Cost of Ignoring Your System’s State

The tech industry is experiencing unprecedented volatility. Companies are scaling faster than ever (and failing faster too). We’ve all watched companies grow from startup to unicorn in record time, only to struggle with the organizational complexity that comes with that growth. The difference between success and failure isn’t strategy or funding, it’s the ability to maintain organizational flow through rapid phase changes.

Every CTO has felt it: that moment when everything that used to work stops working. When adding more people makes things slower. When more process creates more problems. You’re not imagining it. You’re experiencing a phase change, and recognizing it is the first step to managing it.

Organizations that ignore phase changes follow a predictable pattern. They boil over into chaos, panic and implement rigid controls, freeze into bureaucracy, lose their best people, and either fail outright or become zombie companies. Technically alive but innovatively dead. I’ve watched it happen to once-great engineering organizations across the industry.

Mastering the Art of Organizational Flow

When you understand phase changes, you gain predictive power. You’ll spot the early warning signs months before crisis hits. You’ll know which interventions will help and which will hurt. Most importantly, you’ll maintain that productive liquid state where your teams can deliver value consistently while still adapting to change.

Phase changes are inevitable but manageable. The same solution (like adding process) can be medicine in one phase and poison in another. Maintaining flow requires constant vigilance and small adjustments, not massive reorganizations.

Consider how distributed companies like GitLab maintain flow across thousands of employees by using automated boundaries instead of human coordination. Or how Amazon’s two-pizza teams prevent boiling by limiting interaction complexity. Netflix’s famous culture deck emphasizes “context not control” to prevent freezing while maintaining alignment. These aren’t just cultural choices—they’re phase management strategies.

Your Phase Change Action Plan

Start by diagnosing your current phase. Look at your team’s behavior patterns, not just metrics. Are decisions bouncing around with no clear owner? You might be boiling. Are teams waiting on approvals for everything? You might be frozen. Once you know where you are, you can apply phase-specific interventions.

If you’re boiling: Create boundaries. Split large teams into smaller, autonomous units. Define clear ownership for decisions. Automate coordination tasks. Think of it as adding structure to contain the energy, not suppress it.

If you’re frozen: Selectively melt. Identify your most rigid processes and create exceptions. Push decision authority down. Replace approval gates with retrospectives. Focus on outcomes, not compliance.

If you’re liquid: Stay vigilant. Monitor for early warning signs. Build feedback loops that surface problems before they cascade. Invest in automation and tooling that maintains flow without adding rigidity.

Taking the First Steps This Week

This week, gather your leadership team and assess your organization’s phase:

Map your decision flows – how many hops does a typical decision take?
Count your dependencies – how many teams must coordinate for a typical feature?
Measure your cycle times – not just deployment, but idea-to-production
Survey your teams – ask about autonomy, clarity, and friction points

Phase transitions aren’t instant. Moving from boiling to liquid typically takes 2-3 months. From frozen to liquid can take 3-6 months. You’ll face resistance. People adapted to the current phase will find change uncomfortable. Expect some overcorrection before finding balance.

Initially, managing phase transitions means changing established patterns, which feels uncomfortable. But within weeks, you’ll feel the shift. Decisions will flow faster. Teams will stop fighting the system and start working with it. That constant feeling of pushing a boulder uphill? It’ll be replaced by the sensation of surfing a wave.

Creating Ripples of Change

Start with your sphere of influence. If you lead a team, create a pocket of liquid flow within the larger organization. Success is contagious. When other teams see you shipping consistently while they’re stuck in meetings, they’ll want to know your secret. Share it freely. Remember, phase changes can cascade but positive cascades are just as powerful as negative ones.

As Per Bak discovered with his sand piles, complex systems have their own dynamics. You can’t control them, but you can influence them. And sometimes, like that single grain of sand, one CTO who understands phase changes can trigger an avalanche of positive transformation.

The question isn’t whether your organization will experience phase changes. It will. The question is whether you’ll recognize them in time to act. The water is already starting to bubble. What are you going to do about it?