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Are Hidden Blind Spots Limiting Your Organisation’s Growth?

In today's volatile business environment, growth strategies routinely fail to deliver expected results. The issue isn't typically a lack of ambition, resources, or talent. Those elements are often well-known to executive teams. It's what leadership teams don't see that derails their growth trajectory.

Through our strategy work across diverse industries, we've identified consistent patterns: organisations repeatedly stumble over the same predictable obstacles. These aren't random failures, they're systematic blind spots that create invisible barriers to sustainable growth.


The Nine Growth Blind Spots Framework


We've distilled these insights from our client engagements into nine growth blind spots that consistently undermine growth initiatives. This series of articles emerged from reflecting on strategy design sessions, post-implementation reviews, and capturing breakthrough moments where teams finally recognised what had been holding them back.

Each blind spot represents a dimension where even seasoned leadership teams habitually fail to look, question, or act, creating vulnerability precisely where they believe they're strongest.


Blind Spot 1 – The Purpose Blind Spot

Growth and purpose are not mutually exclusive, and growth is not the end, it's the means to achieve your purpose.

Make your purpose front and centre and growth will follow.


Blind Spot 2 – The Strategy Blind Spot

A narrow-minded strategy process can create tunnel vision that limits growth opportunities. Use the Vibrance Growth Map to broaden your view of possibilities during strategy conversations.


Blind Spot 3 – The Trend-Spotting Blind Spot

Obsessing on internal operations can lead to missing the external trends that could kill your business model.

Scan your environment regularly to identify threats early, as well as opportunities that could enable your long-term growth.


Blind Spot 4 – The Employee Blind Spot

No matter how much work you put into designing a bold strategy, disengaged employees won't implement it for you.

Empower employees to become your growth champions.


Blind Spot 5 – The Core Health Blind Spot

Like any living organism, a business model has a life cycle from birth to growth, decline and ultimately death.

Be aware of where your business model sits in its life cycle and avoid throwing resources at a declining model. Use the Business Model Canvas to think through the reinvention of your business model before decline sets in for good.


Blind Spot 6 – The Exploration Blind Spot

The grind of managing and improving the core can blind you to future growth opportunities. Exploring beyond the core must be part of your long-term strategy with sufficient attention and resource allocation to act on new growth opportunities early.


Blind Spot 7 – The Partnership Blind Spot

Years of optimising the core business often make partnerships highly transactional. But don't let a transactional approach to partnerships hold back growth.

Rethink your organisation as the orchestrator or key contributor in a win-win ecosystem that amplifies value creation for all partners involved and creates radically better solutions for end customers.


Blind Spot 8 – The Acquisition Avoidance Bias

Many organisations, especially medium-sized ones, don't consider acquisitions as they feel unprepared to manage such projects. But acquisitions are one of the main growth options available, so don't write them off by default.

Build a programmatic M&A capability to fuel your future growth.


Blind Spot 9 – The Adaptability Blind Spot

Your new strategy could be obsolete within weeks or months of its roll-out. So, don't keep executing an obsolete strategy.

Use Growth Orienteering as your emergent strategy process and let execution insights continuously inform the adaptation of your strategy.


Ready to unlock meaningful growth?


Awareness of these nine common blind spots is an essential starting point. Explore each blind spot by diving into individual articles in the series that include tools, approaches and case studies to help you clearly identify and overcome the highlighted blind spot.

In my next article I’ll introduce our Growth Readiness Assessment tool that will help you identify which blind spots pose the greatest risk to your growth trajectory and where to focus your attention first.


About Fred

Executive advisor on strategy and innovation. Co-author of The Invincible Company, a guide to building resilience in organizations through corporate innovation. The book was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Strategy Award in 2021.

New perspectives on Growth and Innovation. Delivered every Full Moon.

 
 
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