Nobody wants to work for an organisation that is not growing. We all want to be in that organisation that has this ambition with the strategy and actions to back it up. So its not surprising that in the program that I was running for organisations as diverse as financial services, publishing, events management, technology reselling and  food manufacturing from across Europe and Africa growth ambition was one of their common goals. How do we understand our growth options and then build an action plan for growth? The good news is that whatever sector and size of organisation there are some established practical tools that can help us explore this goal.

The old favourites like Ansoff’s Matrix still resonate with the analysis of markets and products considering new and existing initiatives in a simple 2×2 matrix. However, importantly we can also add into the mix some new thinking that embraces the latest ideas from digital thinking and exponential technologies and explores additional ‘growth paths’ such as optimising sales or unconventional strategies. Using a breadth of contemporary organisations to illustrate 10 different growth path mechanisms really helped the executives to reconsider the potential options for their businesses. Of course, it is not just the growth path option that is important, organisations need to assess these growth path choices according to 3 criteria – context, combination and sequence.

What else can help us find our growth formula? Well unlocking our creativity and prototyping our growth model really helps – and forces us to articulate the growth paths clearly. Enter – stage left – using Lego Serious Play for growth. The Lego Serious Play methodology creates new insights by utilising the building of the growth model in Lego materials with the associated metaphors and storytelling that bring the growth strategy to life as well as identifying barriers and supporting initiatives for the organisation’s internal and external ecosystem. The process of defining 10 growth paths and applying these to an organisation combined with the experiential process of building the Lego growth model that these paths represent provides a powerful mechanism to release new creative insights and identify practical growth action plans.