What Does Fearless Growth Look Like?
To be able to respond quickly and intelligently to the fast pace of change in the world, we need all levels and functions in our businesses to be creative and responsive. We need speed.
Do you think your own business is quick enough and agile enough to survive and thrive in today’s fast-moving business markets?
One way to get some idea of whether or not that is the case is to take a simple diagnostic that will provide you with a yardstick for just how fast and fearless your business really is.
In order for your #business to be agile, you need speed. Share on X
To what extent would you say each of the following are true about your business?
Give your company a “5” for each statement that is always or to a great extent true, a “3” for statements that are sometimes or partly true, and a “1” for statements that are false.
- We are ambitious, setting out to do something truly new and groundbreaking that creates enormous new value for the world.
- We anticipate what is likely to change in our business environment, and the new opportunities that these changes may create.
- When we see an opportunity, we develop a smart and differentiated way of addressing it, and we take action immediately to begin to learn.
- We focus appropriate parts of our business on efficiency, consistency, and predictability, and other parts on exploration and innovation.
- We have the courage to displace our existing offerings with new solutions. We would rather disrupt ourselves than be disrupted by others, and would rather create the future than have it forced upon us.
- We don’t restrict our strategic options to only those we can accomplish with our current capabilities. If new capabilities are required to reach our strategic goals, we build or acquire these over time.
- When something unexpected happens—a data breach, a new competitor, a new customer need—we communicate rapidly to make a decision, and take action quickly.
- When we make a strategic decision, we ask, “What action can we take tomorrow to put this in action, and to begin to learn?”
- We constantly experiment, finding low-risk, immediate ways to test strategic alternatives. What works, we keep. What doesn’t, we fix or discard.
- We’re attuned to the damper that incentives can put on growth. We have flexible budgeting and performance management systems. We hold people accountable, but also allow for changes in strategy.
- Our strategies are fluid and designed for learning. We continuously adjust and evolve our plans as we encounter new information, and when the business environment changes.
This list gives you a glimpse of what it feels like to be fast and fearless.
If you gave your company 1s, 2s, or 3s on more than half of these statements, you are probably struggling to move as fast or as fearlessly as you would like. In that case, how can you get from where you are now to where you would like to be?
If you’d like to share this diagnostic with your team, you’ll find a printable version of it here: The Fearless Growth Diagnostic Quiz
