Young organisations fail at unusually high rates because roles, routines, trust and external relationships all have to be invented at once.
Stinchcombe's 1965 chapter set out why the first years are the dangerous ones: the organisation must teach itself its own roles, build trust among strangers, and establish standing with outsiders who have no basis for extending it, all while producing. The hazard falls as those are solved, which is why survival curves are steep early and flat later.
In practice
- A new team's first six months are spent on questions the old team answered a decade ago and never wrote down.
- A supplier with no track record is refused terms that are routine for the incumbent, which makes the track record harder to build.