There's a pattern I see not in one company, but in almost every one where the team grew fast: a rule that worked perfectly, and nobody ever wrote it down.
Take who's allowed to approve a discount for a client without a manager's sign-off. In a small team that's not a policy — it's intuition. The salesperson just knows the ceiling, because they watched the manager decide it, sitting at the next desk. There's no formal limit, and none is needed — everyone understands it the same way.
There's a researched threshold where this stops working — around 150 people (anthropologist Robin Dunbar called it the limit on the number of stable social relationships one person can maintain). Below that line, informal coordination handles itself without any documentation. Above it, it starts quietly falling apart, because nobody ever marked the moment it stopped working.
That's usually how it surfaces — not through a policy review, but through a specific case where two people in neighboring departments decide the same type of question differently, both certain they're doing it "the way it's always been done," and both right, except their "always" meant different things. By then the company has grown several times over, hired people who never saw the manager make that call, and inherited the rule secondhand from a colleague who'd heard it from someone else. Each handoff shifted the line a little.
Technically, nobody broke anything. No document was violated — because there was never a document.
The uncomfortable part of this class of problem is that looking for someone to blame is pointless. The rule was alive as long as it lived in the memory of a small group of people who genuinely knew each other. It didn't survive growth because it was bad — it didn't survive because it was never written down as a rule. It was shared knowledge, and shared knowledge doesn't scale linearly with headcount.
So in a growing company, I don't look for policy violations. I look for the decisions that never had a policy — just "that's how it's always been done." Those are the first to diverge once the team no longer fits in one room.
Which decision in your company still runs on nothing but someone once watching how the manager decided?