In the startup world, we are often drawn to the visible milestones. The breakthrough idea. The first prototype. The incubator or accelerator acceptance. The grant approval. The demo day pitch. The investor meeting. These moments matter. They create belief. They generate momentum. They help founders feel that what they are building is beginning to take shape.
But startups are not sustained by momentum alone.
Behind every promising startup is a quieter, more difficult, and often less celebrated work: building an organization that can survive pressure, absorb uncertainty, and keep growing without losing its purpose. That is why I have come to believe that a startup is never just an idea in motion. It is an organization in the making.
This is where Organization Development or OD, becomes deeply relevant. Association for Talent Development or ATD defines OD as the process of increasing organizational effectiveness and facilitating personal and organizational change through interventions driven by social and behavioral science knowledge. More simply, it is the work of helping an organization align its people, structure, leadership, systems, and culture so it can perform and adapt better. That may sound like language from the corporate world, but it speaks directly to the reality of startups. Startups do not only need innovation. They need alignment.
My own perspective on this has been shaped not only by years of working in the startup and innovation ecosystem, but also by my grounding in Organization Development through the Ateneo Center for Organization Research and Development, or Ateneo CORD. What I value about that formation is that it did not only taught OD as a static set of tools. It framed OD as a discipline of diagnosis, intervention, values-based practice, and organizational learning. The Ateneo CORD Diploma in Organization Development explicitly includes work on the OD project and on Working with Complex Change, which I find especially relevant to startups today.
That grounding matters because startup life is rarely linear.
We often use the term VUCA to describe environments shaped by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. While the term may sound academic, it captures startup life with surprising accuracy. Markets shift. Customer behavior changes. Technologies evolve. Competitors appear unexpectedly. Funding environments tighten or open. Regulations emerge. Teams grow and stretch. Assumptions that looked solid a few months ago can suddenly collapse. In that kind of environment, founders are not simply executing a stable plan. They are constantly reading signals, adjusting strategy, and making decisions in unfinished realities. The Center for Creative Leadership or CCL, leadership guidance for uncertain environments, emphasizes that leaders in these conditions need adaptability, clarity, and learning agility rather than overreliance on certainty and control.
That is why I find it useful to think of startup culture not only as a culture of innovation, but as a culture of working with complex change.
Working with complex change means understanding that not every startup problem has a clean, linear solution. Some challenges cannot be solved simply by pushing harder. Some require reflection, experimentation, dialogue, reframing, and realignment. Some require founders to listen more deeply, even while decisions still need to be made. In real startup settings, leaders rarely get the luxury of complete information before taking action. They have to move while learning, adapt while building, and decide while uncertainty is still present. This is not a failure of leadership. It is the actual terrain of leadership in a startup.
This is also where my Ateneo CORD grounding feels especially meaningful. While I did not find an Ateneo CORD publication specifically about OD for startups, its OD formation clearly emphasizes organizational diagnosis, intervention, and working with change. Ateneo also publicly highlighted a 2024 CORD collaboration on Organization Development for Social Enterprises, which shows that its OD practice is already being applied in enterprise-building contexts beyond traditional corporate settings. That makes the startup application not a stretch, but a natural practitioner lens.
Over the years, I have seen that many startup struggles are not purely product problems or funding problems. Many are organizational problems.
A startup may have a strong idea and still struggle because roles are unclear. A startup may have a capable team and still stall because every meaningful decision returns to the founder. A startup may have momentum in the market and still weaken internally because communication is reactive, tensions stay buried, and culture is left to chance. What appears on the surface as a scaling problem is often, underneath, a problem of alignment, leadership, and organizational design.
This is exactly why OD matters. OD helps founders look beneath the noise and ask deeper questions. How are decisions really being made? Where are the bottlenecks? What assumptions are shaping behavior? What patterns of communication are helping the team, and which ones are quietly eroding trust? How well are structure, strategy, people, and culture reinforcing one another? These are not abstract questions. They are practical growth questions.
In the earliest stage of a startup, informality can be a strength. Everyone wears many hats. Communication is quick. Decisions happen close to the work. The founder is present in almost everything. The team moves on urgency, trust, and shared belief. For a while, that can be a real advantage.
But what works at five people often begins to break at fifteen. And what works at fifteen becomes more difficult at thirty.
As startups grow, the same habits that once created speed can begin to create confusion. Roles blur. Accountability becomes uneven. Team members wait for founder approval. Cross-functional work becomes harder. Meetings multiply. Friction builds quietly before it becomes visible. What once felt agile begins to feel fragile.
This is where many founders encounter a difficult truth: founder hustle is powerful, but it is not a long-term operating system.
That insight is supported by research on startup scaling. McKinsey reported that investors attributed a large share of portfolio company failures to people and organizational issues, and its startup scaling work stresses that founders and teams need to evolve leadership practices and operating models as the company grows. More recent McKinsey work also highlights that hypergrowth is not only about product and market expansion. It is deeply about people, leadership, and the ability of the organization to scale without breaking what made it strong in the first place.
For me, this is where working with complex change becomes part of healthy startup culture. In a VUCA environment, startup culture cannot be defined only by speed, optimism, and hustle. Those are valuable, but they are not enough. A healthy startup culture must also include the ability to sit with ambiguity, surface tensions early, learn in real time, experiment without ego, and realign quickly without damaging trust.
In other words, startup culture must become not only innovative, but adaptive.
That means founders need to build organizations where communication is open, learning is continuous, and emerging issues can be named before they become damaging. It means creating teams that can function even when clarity is incomplete. It means treating change not as an interruption to the work, but as part of the work itself. That perspective sits naturally with an OD lens, especially one shaped by a formation like Ateneo CORD that takes change seriously as both a human and organizational process.
This matters deeply in the Philippine startup ecosystem.
The Philippines already has a policy foundation for startup development through the Innovative Startup Act, Republic Act No. 11337, which was enacted to strengthen, promote, and develop the Philippine startup ecosystem and support startups and startup enablers. That legal foundation matters because it signals that startups are no longer peripheral to national development. They are part of the country’s innovation agenda.
At the support system level, DOST-PCIEERD’s Technology Business Incubation Program defines a TBI as a facility where startups are hosted and provided business development services. The program points to three major objectives: creating jobs, developing entrepreneurs, and promoting public-private partnerships in regional economic development. This matters because it tells us that the national incubation agenda is not only about producing startup ideas. It is about developing ventures that can grow into real enterprises.
And yet, as the ecosystem matures, our understanding of startup support must mature as well.
We should not only ask whether a startup has a prototype, a pitch deck, or early traction. We should also ask whether it is becoming more capable of working with complex change. Is the founder still carrying too much alone? Are responsibilities becoming clearer as the team grows? Is the organization learning from tension, or merely absorbing it? Is culture being shaped intentionally, or only by pressure? Is the team developing the habits that make scale possible?
These are OD questions. But they are also survival questions.
This is why I believe TBIs, accelerators, universities, and startup enablers need to widen their lens. Startup support should not stop at ideation, mentoring, pitching, and market validation. Those are still essential. But they are not enough if we want startups that can survive beyond incubation.
We also need to help founders build the organizational spine of the venture. That includes leadership transitions, team design, decision-making discipline, communication rhythms, conflict navigation, and culture-building. A startup can be pitch-ready and still not be scale-ready. A startup can look innovative from the outside and still be internally brittle.
For regional ecosystems, this becomes even more urgent. Outside major startup centers, founders often work with thinner support systems, smaller talent pools, and more fragmented access to capital and markets. In these settings, organizational weakness becomes costly much earlier. Misalignment drains scarce energy. Unclear roles slow already lean teams. Founder bottlenecks become bigger risks. Stronger OD practice can help regional startups become more resilient, more investable, and more capable of sustained execution. The continuing expansion of TBI and ecosystem support efforts in the regions points to this broader direction, but internal organizational strength must keep pace with ecosystem activity.
As an OD practitioner, one lesson has stayed with me over the years: organizations do not become healthy by accident. They become healthier when leaders are willing to reflect, diagnose, align, listen, and redesign with intention. That lesson is just as true for startups as it is for universities, enterprises, social ventures, and public institutions.
In fact, it may be even more urgent for startups, because when an organization is still small, every weakness is amplified. Every unclear role slows execution. Every unresolved tension erodes trust. Every bottleneck delays momentum. Every unspoken assumption becomes a future risk.
The earlier founders understand this, the better their chances of building something that lasts.
For me, the deeper message is simple. The future of startups in the Philippines will not depend only on better ideas, more founder energy, or more programs. It will also depend on whether we help founders build organizations that can learn, adapt, and grow while working with complex change.
Because a startup is more than an idea. It is an organization in the making.
And in a world shaped by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, the startups that endure will not be only the ones that move fast. They will be the ones that learn deeply, align intentionally, and build cultures strong enough to adapt without losing their purpose.
References
Association for Talent Development. ATD’s Organizational Development Handbook.
Ateneo CORD. “Diploma in Organization Development.” Official program page of the OD diploma, including OD project work and “Working with Complex Change.”
Center for Creative Leadership. “Future Leadership Skills Needed for an Uncertain World.”
Center for Creative Leadership. “Navigating Disruption With RUPT: An Alternative to VUCA.”
McKinsey & Company. “Scaling up: How founder CEOs and teams can go beyond aspiration to ascent.” November 9, 2022.
McKinsey & Company. “From start-up to centaur: Leadership lessons on scaling.” April 29, 2024.
McKinsey & Company. “Ready. Set. Scale. Shaping leaders for hypergrowth.” May 22, 2024.
McKinsey & Company. “Achieving hypergrowth: It’s all about the people.” September 19, 2024.
Republic Act No. 11337. “An Act Providing Benefits and Programs to Strengthen, Promote and Develop the Philippine Startup Ecosystem.” Lawphil.
DOST-PCIEERD. “Technology Business Incubation Program.” Updated January 6, 2026.
Rayjand Talaban Gellamucho writes from the intersection of startups, innovation, and organizational development. Based in Iloilo City, he serves as General Manager of ISAT U Kwadra TBI and Technology Transfer, supporting founders, researchers, and institutions in turning ideas into impact. His perspective is shaped by years of ecosystem-building work and by his OD grounding through Ateneo CORD, which continues to inform how he thinks about leadership, culture, and building through complex change.