Good foundations are load-bearing anchors that protect against collapse anytime something unexpected comes your way.
Every organisation, regardless of size or phase, has foundations around how work gets done: how information moves between people, where and how decisions actually get made, what people can and can't do. These things are rarely designed on purpose. They grow around specific people, around tools that were chosen when the company was half the size, around processes that started as workarounds and quietly became permanent.
But often, these unplanned foundations are insufficient. And so, they work - until they don't. When they don't, a great job suddenly becomes constant, grinding that wears on your soul. When the foundations aren't sufficient, the busy work takes over. Morale drops and the culture suffers as discontent spreads. This is when the instinct to fix the point problems takes over. A series of patchwork solutions begins to litter the landscape. This is how we end up with Frankenstein structures built on foundations created for a single story, narrow building.
And yet, the problem still fundamentally exists. It's just shifted from being visible to papered over. Most times, people know things aren't completely sorted but because no one is screaming, it gets tucked away for a later date - for a time when they will have time to address it. And unfortunately, that time usually ends up being the day the foundation collapses - so what could have been calmly sorted becomes an emergency.
What changes in that scenario isn't the structure or the information, it's the transparency. Often knowing where the blind spots and weak points are, where you can flex and where you can't, what breaks if that one person leaves tomorrow is enough. Awareness and visibility are foundational too. They enable more rational decision-making.
And logically, awareness leads to action; by nature, your foundations should be adaptive to remain fit for purpose. And yet, they are the first things to be treated as static artifacts - whether it's ways of working, systems and tooling, company traditions or the unwritten rules.
It's easier to let these be than to go through the pain of truly asking people to change. But the cost of not changing is the cost you're already paying: the firefighting, the busywork and the grumbling.
Good foundations don't magically fix things, but they stop the firefighting. Build them well and they serve, rather than constrain you.