The Anatomy of Growth Orienteering

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 phases to Growth Orienteering. 

1. Growth Ambition - Agree the Destination 

2. Growth Strategy - Chart the Course 

3. Growth Realisation - Walk the Path

Growth Ambition - 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. The Growth Map

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 can open the aperture of possible futures for the organisation and open up new growth possibilities.

To define and align on a shared ambition, we found the following approach to be the most effective: 

1. Business Model Review 

We begin by assessing the current Business Model. Using the Strategyzer Business Model Canvas, we map value propositions, customer segments, channels, customer relationships, revenue streams, key activities, key resources, key partners and cost structure. This provides a baseline on how the organisation creates value today and surfaces strength, weaknesses, and key strategic questions. 

2. Disruption Risk Assessment 

Next, we scan the external environment for key trends that will create both risks and opportunities for the business and subsequently evaluate the risk of disruption to the current business model. We also envisage the future demise of the business (every business model eventually dies, it’s just a matter of how long it takes) to spur a radically different discussion about the terrains that might need to be explored to achieve future growth, if the core business was no longer the main growth driver.  

3. Opportunity Mapping 

Once we have made explicit your growth ambition, the current business model and external risks, we use the Growth Map to broaden the thinking about where and how to grow. We make the company’s growth gap explicit and map the Growth Terrains (e.g. Core-Build, New-Buy) that need to be explored, as well as those that won’t. Finally, we ideate and map out potential opportunities in various selected Growth Terrains. For instance, partnerships and acquisitions can be explored at this stage as avenues for rapid expansion, enabling the organisation to leverage external capabilities, access new markets, and unlock synergies that may otherwise take years to develop organically.

Fig 2. The Growth Gap

The sense of urgency that is generated by taking a future-back perspective in the Growth Ambition phase 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. 

Growth Strategy - Chart the Course 

With ambition clarified and first opportunities surfaced, the second step is about charting the best course to realise that ambition. This step culminates in the definition of a Growth Strategy with a prioritised portfolio of initiatives to realise your growth ambitions. 

The steps to get there involve: 

1. Opportunity Prioritisation 

To prioritise opportunities, we begin by defining clear, context-specific criteria. These typically include market potential, desirability, feasibility, and viability. Often, we also consider the opportunity’s potential to extend the organisation’s purpose or unlock access to a strategic domain—whether that’s a critical new customer segment, an enabling capability, or a new geographic market. 

In parallel we use business model design to clearly articulate how each opportunity would create, deliver, and capture value. This provides a richer basis for comparison, enabling leadership teams to make sharper priority decisions across a diverse set of opportunities. 

2. Business Model Validation 

Given the high uncertainty of growth initiatives at this stage, Charting the Course also involves experimentation on most of the risk assumptions within each growth opportunity. For a new product opportunity in the Build-New terrain for instance, that would involve designing experiments to test the most risky assumptions related to your understanding of new customer segments (that you’re not serving yet), their key needs (that you’re unfamiliar with), and their interest for the solution that you have in mind (that would also be an unknown at this stage). 

3. Operating Model Design 

Some growth plays can’t thrive under the constraints of the core business operating model. They require new rhythms, decision-making cadences, funding approaches, and even governance. In this step, we work with organisations to assess whether their existing operating model can support the execution of their growth strategy—and where it cannot, we design a parallel model. This might include a dedicated growth board, new cross-functional teams, or ring-fenced funding and resource pools. Without this scaffolding, even the best growth ideas will struggle to survive the gravitational pull of business-as-usual. 

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. 

For another organisation, a strong partnership ecosystem might need to be prioritised to help enable them to source complementary capabilities, resources, or market access that the organisation currently lacks, and that would be critical to the success of a growth initiative. 

Growth Realisation - Walk the Path 

Walking the Path is all about Growth Realisation. This is where growth efforts become real. But while most organisations intellectually understand the importance of execution, few are truly equipped to deliver growth initiatives at pace and scale. Growth Realisation is about translating strategy into action, and action into tangible value.  

This requires: 

1. Execution Planning 

Validated opportunities and any new required capabilities need to be translated into actionable implementation plans.  

2. People Enablement 

Execution isn’t just about systems, it’s about people. This step focuses on ensuring your leaders and teams have the capabilities, incentives, and mindset to deliver. We often hear organisations say, "Our people are our greatest asset." In practice, that means investing in the skills, confidence, and alignment needed to bring growth opportunities to life. It also means ensuring that the teams exploring new Growth Terrains are supported, not stifled, by the broader organisation. From executive sponsorship to team empowerment, we help you enable the people who will make growth happen. 

3. Value Delivery 

At this stage, growth is not a concept. It is something you can see, measure, and learn from. We focus on ensuring growth initiatives are delivering value back to the organisation and customers, and that value realisation is tracked and celebrated. Crucially, we also close the loop between execution and strategy. Not every initiative will succeed, but every initiative should teach. Growth Realisation thrives when organisations embrace an adaptive mindset, iterating on what works, pivoting where necessary, stopping what’s no longer needed and using feedback to refine both the strategy and the system that supports it. 

Bringing it together

• Beyond incremental growth is hard to achieve and traditional strategy approaches have rarely delivered.

• Growth Orienteering is a 3-phase approach to ensuring all bases are covered. 

• It starts with Growth Ambition - Agree the Destination, which combines a review of the current business model(s), an external environment scan to assess the disruption risk and the mapping of future opportunities to inspire thinking of where and how to grow, and set the Growth Ambition. 

• It continues with Growth Strategy - Charting the Course, where we prioritise the various growth opportunities, test and validate the business models that will unlock those opportunities, and design changes to the organisation operating model(s) that will enable growth initiatives to succeed. It culminates in a defined Growth Strategy. 

• It completes with Growth Realisation - Walking the Path, where design changes to the organisation operating model(s) are implemented, required initiatives to enable people to drive growth projects are put in place, growth projects are run and value delivery is supported with the rigour and infrastructure needed to support the parallel execution of growth opportunities and all enablement initiatives that support them.  

• 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. 

Fig 3. Growth Orienteering

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 setting the Growth Ambition 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.