The Growth Map
Walk into any strategy session and you'll hear ambitious growth targets. Walk out and you'll notice something troubling: the "new" strategy sounds remarkably like the old one.
This isn't a failure of ambition—it's a failure of exploration. Most organisations ask the right strategic questions but answer them within painfully narrow boundaries. The result? Plans that feel safe, familiar, and ultimately insufficient to close the growth gap they were designed to bridge.
Why a New Tool
The Growth Map solves this strategic exploration problem. It's a visual strategy framework that maps every possible growth path available to your organisation, forcing you to consider options you typically ignore and better align resource allocation with growth ambition.
But this isn't just another strategy canvas. The Growth Map is built on a fundamental insight: breakthrough growth requires seeing the full strategic landscape.
How It Works
Step 1: Set Your Strategic Horizon
Most strategy work focuses on the very short-term (12-24 months). This timeline locks you into incremental thinking. The Growth Map invites you to take a long-term view (minimum 5-year horizon) because breakthrough growth opportunities require time to unfold. This longer view forces you to spot weak signals, plant strategic seeds, and think beyond tactical optimisation..
Step 2: Make Your Growth Gap Visible
Define your ambition—revenue, customers, impact, whatever matters most. Then project your current trajectory forward using historical growth rates. The space between these lines is your growth gap. This isn't a failure metric; it's your strategic compass.
Step 3: Map All Nine Growth Terrains
The Growth Map combines two critical dimensions:
Where will growth come from?
Core: Your existing business
Adjacent: Nearby spaces you can credibly enter
New: Unfamiliar terrain serving different customers or needs
How will you get there?
Build: Develop internally
Partner: Collaborate with others
Buy: Acquire or invest
This creates nine distinct growth terrains. Each represents a real path to growth, if you choose to explore it.
What the Map Reveals
The Growth Map's power lies in what it exposes. Too many strategies default to a single terrain: Build-Core. It's comfortable, feels low-risk, but rarely delivers transformational growth.
When you map your current strategy across all nine terrains, the blind spots become obvious:
Which terrains are you ignoring entirely?
How much of your growth gap can a sole "Build-Core" focus realistically deliver?
Are your resources aligned with where growth actually needs to come from?
These questions often reveal uncomfortable truths: minimal investment in growth areas beyond "Core" despite strategic dependence on them, capability gaps in terrains critical for long-term success, and resource allocation that contradicts stated priorities.
From Mapping to Momentum
The Growth Map doesn't guarantee growth, but it creates clarity. It gives your leadership team a shared language for strategic choices and makes invisible trade-offs visible.
The real work begins when you use the map to allocate resources, build capabilities, and sequence initiatives across multiple terrains. Because if your growth plan only explores one or two terrains, you're not doing strategy—you're following default patterns.
And following default patterns rarely produces breakthrough results.
