I’ve played enough tournament rounds in golf to know a caddy can be invaluable. Not because they know my game, or the game itself, better than I do. They’re valuable because they see what I’m too occupied to see. I’m reading my lie and thinking about the shot I see myself hitting. They’re reading the wind that’s about to shift, or a slope on the green that may affect the shot I’m thinking about. Neither of us has the whole picture by ourselves. Together, we usually do.
That’s a feedback loop, even if nobody on the bag would call it that: information about what’s actually happening, flowing back to whoever’s deciding, in time to change something.
Sports clubs run on the same principle, whether anyone’s ever named it or not. In a small club, the person running it, call them the founder, the director, or whoever’s been leading it since growth started, doesn’t need a formal system for knowing what’s going on. They’re most of the system. They see the practice. They hear the parents in the stands or parking lots. They notice when a coach seems off before anyone says a word to them directly.
That’s not a weakness. At that size, one person paying attention is the fastest feedback loop there is.
Then the club grows, and something strange happens. The leader often feels less informed at exactly the moment their organization becomes more successful.
They attend fewer practices, because there are more of them, at more facilities, at overlapping times. Conversations that used to happen face to face become secondhand, filtered through whoever happened to be there. The coach who used to stop by after practice to mention something small now runs a program out of a different facility entirely, and the small thing never gets mentioned. A parent assumes someone else has already brought up the issue, because surely, in an organization this size, someone has.
The leader isn’t seeing less because they’re paying less attention. They’re seeing less because the organization now has more places for information to hide.
Growth doesn’t produce noise. It produces silence.
You’d expect growth to feel like more information coming in: more complaints, more conversations, more signals. What actually happens is closer to the opposite. The leader stops hearing about problems, not because the problems stopped, but because the informal channel that used to carry that information straight to them no longer reaches everywhere the club now operates. Silence gets mistaken for things being fine.
Every organization eventually outgrows one person’s ability to observe it. That’s the founder’s trap.
I call it that because it’s memorable, but it isn’t limited to founders. It affects any organization whose awareness depends primarily on one person’s observations, whether that person built the club thirty years ago or was hired to run it eighteen months ago.
The vulnerability here isn’t ego or control. The founder succeeds precisely because they notice everything, and the habits that make a club successful in its early years become impossible to sustain as it grows. The problem is structural: the organization was designed, without anyone deciding to design it this way, around a single source of awareness. When that person is stretched thin by the growth itself, or eventually steps back, the club doesn’t just lose a leader. It loses its only way of noticing, because it never learned how to notice without them.
This is why the same story keeps repeating across clubs that otherwise look nothing alike. A facility issue that gets mentioned to three different people over the course of a season, none of whom realize it’s the same complaint, until months of frustration finally reach someone who can actually fix it. A coach who quits unexpectedly, after a year of struggling quietly with something nobody ever asked about. A budget problem that surfaces in a board meeting that could have been caught three months earlier, if anyone had been looking in the right place.
None of those were actually sudden. They just weren’t reaching anyone until they were too big to miss.
Building an organization that notices
Every leader has blind spots. The challenge is that organizations usually grow faster than leaders discover where their blind spots are.
Most respond to growth by adding staff, software, or meetings. None of those are solutions by themselves. The real question isn’t how to get more information. It’s what new information would help the organization notice something sooner, and whether anyone would actually see it if it showed up.
The answer isn’t replacing the founder’s judgment. It’s extending it.
Healthy organizations intentionally build multiple ways of noticing. They don’t depend on one person’s observations. They design systems that surface problems early enough to act.
Organizations don’t become resilient when they have better leaders. They become resilient when they can keep learning even after their leaders can’t personally see everything anymore.
Where this leaves you
Imagine you stepped away from your club for one season. Not forever. Just one season.
What would your organization stop learning? Which problems would continue to grow because nobody was positioned to notice them?
The answers probably reveal whether you’ve built a club, or simply become the club’s only early-warning system.
The healthiest organizations don’t remove the leader from the feedback loop. They make sure the leader isn’t carrying it alone.
Questions for Leaders
What do we currently know only because one person happened to notice it and say something?
What don’t we know because we have no way of finding out?
Which of our “sudden” problems last year were actually building for months?
Written by
Nathan Holm
Strategic innovation advisory for sports leaders navigating a rapidly changing industry.