Facilitating organizational change through innovative management practices: a case of Framery

Speed and informal decision-making help young companies grow. As they scale, the same habits can start shifting work onto other teams without anyone deciding that they should. This article looks at how that happened in a Finnish growth company, why both sides of the conflict acted sensibly, and what managers can do before a late change reaches the people who must absorb it.

Authors: Gilbert Gueye & Sajal Kabiraj

Growth turns independent teams into dependent ones

In a small company, the person who decides often also deals with its consequences. A short conversation in the corridor is enough, because everyone who needs to know is nearby. Growth changes this. Products get more complex, work is split between specialized teams, and each decision starts to affect people who were not part of it. Research on scaling firms treats this as a lasting tension that companies keep having to manage (Tippmann et al. 2023). Paradox theory says the same about opposing demands in general: speed and control are connected, and the balance between them needs constant adjustment (Smith & Lewis 2011).

When the balance tips, the result is what researchers call organizational debt: outdated or missing structures, policies and processes that make it harder for an organization to adapt (Al-Baik et al. 2024). Like technical debt in software, it is cheap to take on and expensive to pay back. In a case study of a large agile organization, it showed up mainly as knowledge that existed on people’s heads and as weak coordination between teams (Liu et al. 2024).

Agility looked different depending on where you sat

Framery, a Tampere-based manufacturer of soundproof office pods, is a good example. The company was founded in 2010, listed on Nasdaq in December 2025 (Nasdaq 2025) and employs almost 498 people in 19 countries (Framery 2025). The observations below come from 14 cross-functional interviews carried out for a master’s thesis at LAB University of Applied Sciences in the months after the listing (Gueye 2026).

In product development, speed was a source of pride. One participant said that “agile grassroots decision making is expected and celebrated “, and that technical problems were solved quickly instead of being sent to committees. The same participant admitted that these decisions were “often made in the corridor and not documented”. The reasons and the costs stayed in people’s heads.

Further down the chain, the same habit looked very different. A participant from the Smart Office Solutions function described how the lights of a product were decided only a month before launch, which “resulted in last minute changes that affected the work of other departments”. A participant from Operations said that relying on individuals to manage systems and data “is no longer sustainable and can lead to bottlenecks and burnout “.

Neither side was wrong. Product developers were doing what had made the company successful. Downstream teams were asking for what a larger company needs: decisions that are recorded, shared and made early enough to plan around. The friction came from how the work was organized, and organizational culture would predict it. Groups inside one company, such as functions, form subcultures that can read the same value in opposite ways (Martin 2002).

Conflict management in young companies

Conflicts can be managed in young companies by developing good relationships with stakeholders. Stakeholders include internal employees as well as external partners such as banks and customers. Conflicts in young companies are dynamic and can be classified into task conflict, process conflict, and interpersonal conflict based on the increasing order of the nature of the conflict. Therefore, it is imperative for the organizations to ensure that the conflict does not develop into the higher order levels (Wong et al. 2016).

Conflict management styles are situational, time-bound, and is characteristic of the position and the representation of the person in the organization. Therefore, these can change based on the context. Proactiveness in addressing queries can be a good tool in conflict resolution and can strengthen the social fabric of the organization.

Conflict that is not managed constructively often is result of differences in negotiation styles which affects the outcome of a negotiation and thereby its implementation. Various conflict management options (investigation-negotiation-mediation-arbitration-adjudication-litigation) exist and be exercised depending upon the degree of severity.

Some of the new rules brought relief

A stock-exchange listing brings new guidelines, and it is easy to assume they threaten a creative culture. The interviews did not fully support that view. One participant said that more corporate guidelines had made innovation work easier, because the added structure had “given some peace to a situation where people were shouting at the same time”. For the teams at the end of the chain, clear rules felt like protection. Managers who treat every new process as bureaucracy may miss what it gives these teams.

Four questions to ask before approving a late change

Not every company can reorganize around core teams at once. A lighter starting point is to make the downstream cost visible whenever a decision changes late in a project. A product owner or project manager can ask:

Which teams will have to change their work because of this decision, and have they seen it?
Is the decision written down where those teams will find it, with who decided, and what changed and why?
Does the remaining time before launch exist in the downstream teams’ plans?
Does the team that benefits from the change also carry its cost? If not, who agreed to that?

These questions do not forbid late changes, and some are worth making. The point is to see and agree on the cost before the change is made.

Where does this cost finally land?

Customer-facing operations shows the same pattern outside product development. Decisions agreed directly between an external partner and sales did not always reach everyone who handled the resulting orders, and some of those orders stalled in production. One proposed fix was to post every such decision in a shared team channel, notify the whole team and have one person confirm which open orders it affects. This is a core team on a small scale: the people who absorb a decision hear about it when it is made.

The case suggests that agility causes trouble when fast decisions leave no shared record. As a company grows, a decision that once touched one team starts to touch several. Leaders can keep the speed that made the company successful if the teams that absorb a change also help make it.

These observations come from a Finnish company. They were collected soon after a major change by a researcher who works in one of its downstream teams and may lean towards the downstream view. They show what can happen, not how often it happens. In another company the dividing line may run between countries or sales regions rather than functions. Two next steps would be useful. The first is to ask downstream teams how core teams work from their side. The second is to track two simple figures: the number of changes made after an agreed design freeze, and the downstream hours those changes cost. Later, it would be worth checking whether the late changes show up as delivery delays or customer complaints.

Conclusion

Unresolved conflict can prove to be detrimental to the growth of young companies. Human sustainability element is important in conflict resolution apart from investments in finances, legal process and time. Creating a support system for persons, addressing the humane elements, and sharing experiences through timely discussions and informal conversations can help minimizing conflict escalation. Good resolution of conflict supports the creation of opportunities for development, learning, creativity, and innovation in young companies.

References

Al-Baik, O., Abu Alhija, M., Abdeljaber, H. & Ovais Ahmad, M. 2024. Organizational debt—Roadblock to agility in software engineering: Exploring an emerging concept and future research for software excellence. PloS One. Vol. 19 (11). Cited on 28 Sep 2026. Available at https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0308183

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Gueye, G. 2026. Analyzing the Interplay of Organizational Culture and Innovation in Framery: Towards Actionable Insights for Sustained Creativity. Master’s thesis. LAB University of Applied Sciences, Master’s degree programme in Business Innovation, Culture and Creativity. Cited on 28 Sep 2026. Available at https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2026101227722

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Authors

Gilbert Gueye is a Master of Business Administration (MBA) student in the Business Innovation, Culture and Creativity programme at LAB University of Applied Sciences, Finland. He has worked at Framery for over nine years in customer-facing operations, and this article is based on his master’s thesis.

Sajal Kabiraj, PhD, works as Principal lecturer at LAB School of Business, LAB University of Applied Sciences, Finland.

Illustration: https://unsplash.com/photos/people-collaborating-in-creative-workspace-E7Tph3v7SIQ (Unsplash Licence)