What Saturday Night Live Reveals About Growth Systems

I’ve been reading Live From New York, the oral history of Saturday Night Live.

What stayed with me wasn’t the comedy. It was the operating model.

For over fifty years, SNL has functioned under conditions most organizations would consider unsustainable:

• Weekly live delivery

• Constant talent turnover

• Strong personalities and egos

• Public failure, on schedule

By conventional business logic, this should collapse.

It didn’t.

And the reason matters far beyond television.

SNL Was Never Built for Harmony or Efficiency

SNL survived not because it optimized for smoothness, alignment, or predictability.

It survived because it was designed around a clear core:

• Respond to reality as it’s happening

• Protect the system, not individual stars

• Keep the cadence, even when it’s messy

This distinction is crucial.

Most organizations, when they grow, instinctively try to eliminate tension:

They add layers.

They slow decisions.

They optimize for consensus.

They stabilize prematurely.

But SNL did the opposite.

It accepted instability as a design condition, not a failure mode.

SNL also survives because its audience understands the contract.

Live risk is not a defect. It’s the value.

Systems endure when they are aligned with what their customers are actually willing to live with, not what leaders wish were true.

This Is Not a “Creative Company” Story

This is where many business leaders stop listening.

They think: “We’re not in media.”

“We don’t do comedy.”

“We’re not a creative shop.”

That’s a misread.

This isn’t a creative industry story.

It’s a high-constraint operating system story.

Strip away the stage and the jokes, and what’s left is a system built to withstand:

• Speed without perfection

• Disagreement without paralysis

• Exposure without retreat

• Turnover without identity loss

Every growing business faces these pressures — whether it’s in technology, finance, retail, professional services, or manufacturing.

Most just don’t name them clearly.

Why Non-Creative Businesses Struggle More With This

Non-creative organizations are often less prepared for these conditions, not more.

Why?

Because they tend to believe:

• Stability equals maturity

• Fewer conflicts equals better leadership

• Predictability equals control

So when complexity increases, they respond by:

• Over-planning

• Over-optimizing

• Adding process before clarity

• Eliminating tension before understanding what the system actually needs to hold

The result isn’t resilience.

It’s fragility.

The system becomes very good at operating in yesterday’s reality, and brittle in today’s.

Growth Breaks Systems Built for a Smaller Truth

Here’s the uncomfortable part most leadership teams avoid:

Growth doesn’t fail because people aren’t capable.

It fails because the system was designed for a simpler version of the business.

A smaller market.

Fewer stakeholders.

Lower speed.

Less exposure.

As the environment changes, leaders keep trying to “fix execution,” when what’s actually broken is fit — between the system and the reality it’s now operating in.

That’s when teams feel busy but stuck.

Aligned but slow.

Competent but frustrated.

This Is Not a Technology Problem

What’s usually missing is not tools, platforms, or systems.

What’s missing is clarity around human intent and tension:

• What problem are we actually solving?

• For whom?

• And what tensions are we trying to resolve, rather than erase?

Technology amplifies decisions. It doesn’t create them.

When the underlying problem is misframed, technology simply helps teams move faster in the wrong direction.

This is why the work must start upstream — with discernment, not solutions.

The Real Leadership Question

At a certain stage, the most important question is no longer:

How do we make this smoother?

It’s:

What must this system be able to withstand — week after week — to do its job well?

That question changes everything.

It shifts the conversation from:

• tools → structure

• activity → sequencing

• harmony → capacity

And it’s often the point where external perspective becomes necessary — not to judge quickly, but to discern what the organization is actually facing.

Why This Matters

In my work with leaders of emerging and growing businesses, I see this pattern repeatedly:

Teams don’t just struggle with execution.

They struggle to clearly frame the human problem they’re solving — for customers and for their own people — and to design a system that can carry that work without collapsing under pressure.

This work isn’t about quick judgment.

It’s about discernment: holding ambiguity, listening for unspoken tensions, and framing the right problem before deciding what comes next.

Only after clarity comes sequence.

Only after sequence comes effective execution.

Not all disorder is dysfunction.

Some systems survive precisely because they are not over-managed.

The question is whether yours is one of them.