Growth Orienteering is a holistic organisation-wide approach to ensuring you are covering all the bases required to deliver step change growth. It doesn’t diminish growth’s complexity; nor offer any silver bullets. Rather, Growth Orienteering allows a more structured conversation around the strategy and enablement of growth, which in turn leads to greater clarity on the focus areas needed to achieve it.
The Challenge with Growth
Most organisations want to grow but struggle to do so. Just the word “growth” embodies so much. Is growth about ‘bigger’? Or could it also embody ‘better’, ‘smarter’ or ‘more sustainable’? Even if taking a straightforward traditional view around revenue expansion, different executives will likely identify different ingredients that are required for growth. One might see a list that includes:
A clear growth strategy
A culture of innovation
The right talent
Execution capabilities
Core operational excellence
The right operating model
Sufficient capital to invest
Favourable industry context
Favourable macroeconomic context
Luck
If any one of the above (which is not intended to be an exhaustive list) is not working in favour of growth, it will likely derail the whole damn show. In other words, growth needs everything to work in concert. It is no wonder that growth feels so hard.
Our frustration with the haphazard and largely inconsistent approaches employed by different organisations spurred us to develop a clearer way to think about and ultimately achieve growth. More often than not, growth gets derailed simply because an organisation fails to focus on one or some of the component requirements to achieve it.
Enter Growth Orienteering.
The Growth Orienteering Approach
There are three steps to Growth Orienteering.
Agree the Destination
Chart the Course
Walk the Path
Step 1: Agree the Destination
This doesn’t have to be a long drawn out strategy process that takes months to consider competitive forces, trends, customer needs, etc. You’ve likely done that before and it didn’t create new opportunities that catapulted your organisation into a vastly different financial, customer or purpose driven stratosphere. Rather, mapping a wide spectrum of growth opportunities and defining a growth ambition can literally be done in a few days if you bring the right inputs.
As per our earlier article that introduced the Growth Map underpinning Growth Orienteering, most organisations have a number of blind spots when it comes to where and how they are going to achieve growth. Once your growth ambition is set, the next step of Growth Orienteering is to identify your growth gap and align on what will contribute to the closing of that gap. Growth Orienteering doesn’t make choices between markets, industries, products, or customers. Rather, it considers a combination of where growth needs to come from and how it might be achieved, and as a byproduct also makes explicit the areas that will deliberately not be in focus. We call the intersection of these Where and How dimensions (e.g. Core-Build or New-Buy) Growth Terrains.
Fig 1. Growth Map - Growth Orienteering Framework
Unsurprisingly, it can at times be difficult for organisations to see beyond the here and now of Core-Build. Expanding the thinking into new territories through intervention activities can open the aperture of possible futures for the organisation. To achieve this, we found the following approaches to be the most effective:
Reviewing the current Business Model to surface strength, weaknesses, and key strategic questions,
Scanning the external environment for key trends creating both risks and opportunities, and subsequently assessing the risk of disruption of the current business model,
Envisaging the future demise of the business (every business model eventually dies) to spur a radically different discussion about terrains that would need to be explored to achieve the growth ambition if the core business was no longer the main growth driver.
The sense of urgency that is generated by taking a future-back perspective also lends itself well to identifying quick wins. Assessing the landscape in this way almost always generates a number of no regrets moves that immediately unblock existing growth efforts with little to no cost to the business.
Step 2: Chart the Course
Charting the Course culminates in the definition of a Growth Strategy with a prioritised portfolio of initiatives to realise your growth ambitions.
To identify and prioritise the initiatives with highest potential we leverage business model design to clarify how each initiative would create value. This spans all situations and terrains. For instance you should make explicit how a proposed shift to the existing business could unlock further value, or how new product or service ideas could help the organisation generate new revenues with existing or new customer segments.
Given the high uncertainty of some growth initiatives, Charting the Course also involves some Customer Validation and experiments to test the most risky assumptions related to new markets, new customer segments, and new customer needs. However, our experience shows that focusing on growth initiatives alone is not enough.
What might prevent an organisation from achieving their growth ambitions? Ask this to both executive teams and those at the forefront of delivery and you will likely receive a long list of obstacles that impede their ability to realise growth. Charting the Course involves designing the enablers to overcome the obstacles that prevent growth.
Ironically, the list of the main blockers tends to look quite similar regardless of the industry or size of organisation. As such, we have identified a common set of growth enablers that need to be in place if an organisation is to deliver growth.
Fig 2. Growth Enablers
This list constitutes a good starting point but we need to ensure that the enablers we put in place are perfectly tailored to your organisation. The tailoring is important.
For example, let’s say that a big chunk of the growth gap needs to be filled by revenue from adjacent and new terrains. It may well be that the existing operating model that allocates funding through a particular governance approach is perfectly fine for core business growth, but grossly inadequate for more speculative growth experiments. For this organisation, the Growth Strategy would also have to prioritise designing a parallel operating model to support adjacent and new innovation.
Charting the Course involves an honest appraisal of the various obstacles that could derail your growth ambitions, and defining a Growth Strategy with the right priorities across growth initiatives and enablement initiatives required to support the execution of growth.
Step 3: Walk the Path
Walking the Path is all about Growth Delivery. This means pursuing actual growth options and overcoming growth obstacles by implementing the prioritised growth enablers.
Even if this step is easy to grasp, the reality remains that execution is hard and will require rigour and the right scaffolding to be put in place in terms of change management, initiative execution and often operating model (re)design interventions required to sustain growth efforts over time.
At the same time execution rigour should not lead to blind rigidity. Regular iterations between Charting the Course and Walking the Path are required. Key learnings from initiative execution should flow through the organisation, even when they contradict the agreed plan. For growth outcomes to be ultimately achieved, design and testing, strategy and execution should keep informing each other.
Bringing it together
Beyond incremental growth is hard to achieve and traditional strategy approaches have rarely delivered.
Growth Orienteering is a 3-step approach to ensuring all bases are covered.
It starts with Step 1 - Agree the Destination, which combines an external environment scan with the exploration of possible futures to inspire thinking of where and how to grow, and set the Growth Ambition.
Step 2 - Charting the Course, is about mapping your various growth options, evaluating existing obstacles and designing a set of enablers that will unlock your growth aspirations. It culminates in a defined Growth Strategy.
Step 3 - Walking the Path, is the execution in parallel of growth opportunities and the enablement initiatives that support them.
There is regular iteration between Charting the Course and Walking the Path so that design and testing, strategy and execution inform each other.
Where to from here?
Growth Orienteering is not rocket science and we repeat that it is not a silver bullet. It is however the only way we know to reliably deliver on growth ambitions beyond incrementalism. Radical growth is often falsely associated with creative brilliance. We see it as something that can be systematised over a period of time.
This time dimension speaks to growth as a journey. It is not conducive to a typical three month project, but requires an explorer mindset over a multi year timeframe. And yet, the starting point of Assessing the Landscape takes only a few days.
Growth Orienteering is hard, exhilarating, and rewarding. Orienteering means at times you get lost, double back and forge new paths. But you don’t need to reach a finish line to reap rewards. Value is created as you walk the path. Value is created by embracing something new when the traditional approach has delivered status quo. Value is created by looking at things through a different lens and seeing the entire growth picture from a more holistic standpoint.