As a business owner since 1987, I have discovered a lot about culture. While economists define SMEs by the number of people employed, I define them by the overlap between ownership and leadership. The owner-leaders will always be the ultimate leaders of company culture because their values and philosophies will define that culture. Also, they will be there for the long term and hence it is unwise to take a hands-off approach by delegating culture to others. It is a great risk to delegate accountability for the culture because this is part of their key point of difference in the marketplace.The challenges of that lack of clarity for owner-leaders is often the starting point for destabilizing their culture. This usually presents itself as the company grows and the owner-leader begins to appoint other team leaders (which they might call managers). Employees who were directly connected to the owner-leader now have someone in between them. In addition to this relationship change there is theadditional challenge of the lack of clarity of accountability and decision rights. Although others have been appointed to lead, many decisions still go back to the owners. These problems are exacerbated with growth and so scaling from 10 to 30 or 20 to 40 people becomes very challenging.Complexity and cultureOwner-leaders have a big advantage but only if they recognise it and harness it. They have small complex systems where all the decision rights are within this system. This is vastly different from other organization types where the scale of the organization is so vast, and the decision-making is so complex that no one human can digest it.A way to make sense of your business is to think of it as a set of relationships. Imagine looking down on your business (a map of your business) where each person is connected to all others by relationships. In a group of 20 people there are 90 relationships. In a group of 40 people there are potentially 780 relationships. This geometric progression between numbers of people and relationships underscores the cultural complexity with growth. With succession thinking I have used two established areas of learning – system thinking and sense-making.Systems thinking and sense-making System thinking celebrates the interdependence defined by these relationships. How we organize ourselves to be effective and of great service to customers is critical to a resilient business culture. In addition to great outcomes for our customers, we need to simultaneously design to make sure we don’t introduce cultural challenges. A typical challenge is to introduce a power hierarchy with a chain of command. This is still very prevalent, but it is poor design in the SME context. Especially when theteam members have historically been connected directly with the owner-leader. The key guidance for design is that we maintain both psychological and accountability trust.Sense-making is equally important. I was trained in map making and have a bias toward that way of making sense of things. I applied this thinking to business, and I discovered it is well aligned with the learning domain of sense-making. I recognized that everyone has their own view of the business and I needed to provide a common point of focus. You can’t provide feedback on a system in chaos. Being able to provide an approximation of how the business works, gives all in the business the power to contribute, which is important when giving agency to your team.There is a direct connection between how you organize yourself and the culture you build. It starts with the SME owner being clear about their roles and where accountability sits. As they grow and hand over accountabilities and decision rights to others, it is wise to make sense of this for everyone in the organization. This provides clarity and mitigates the risk of many cultural problems. Successionthinking harnesses sense-making and systems-thinking as a means to solve this challenge.