This session in the IRG100 program is built around peer problem solving. Participants prepare a personal or corporate challenge from the how module, pitch it in sixty seconds, and the group picks the most interesting ones to hack together.
The rest of the deck prepares the cohort for the virtual Cannes finale and introduces the IRG1000 corporate leadership program, which was launching that September.
Key findings
- Challenges are drawn from the four how topics: human-centric transformation, open culture, the anticipative organization and whole-brained working.
- The format is tight. Five minutes to prepare, sixty seconds to pitch, thirty minutes in groups of four, then ten minutes of plenary in which each group shares its single most actionable learning.
- The two things participants owe before the finale are a finalized humanized growth ambition and the beginnings of a growth plan, which can be corporate initiatives or new value propositions.
- IRG1000 is designed for teams of twenty marketing and cross-functional colleagues with more than ten years of experience, over four months at two to three hours a week.
How the sparring works
Participants take five minutes to prepare a key challenge, personal or corporate, from one of the four how topics. In groups of four they pitch it in no more than sixty seconds each, select the most interesting and relevant, and then spend the rest of the half hour hacking it.
The plenary that follows asks for one thing per group: the single most important and actionable learning, in ten minutes.
Toward the finale
The finale gives participants a chance to get advice from a group of senior leaders, including the CMO of Coca-Cola’s sparkling business, Unilever’s chief digital and marketing officer, the chief executive of the United Nations Global Compact, the chief executive of WPP, Shell’s global marketing vice president and a chief financial officer.
The prize at the end is to become the Humanized Growth Champion of 2021, and the two deliverables leading to it are a finalized growth ambition and a growth plan for the participant’s organization.
The corporate program
IRG1000 was presented as the corporate version of the same idea. Its objectives are concrete growth plans for the business and the person, cross-functional team capability to deliver more humanized growth, and connection to world-class content, experts and practitioners.
The curriculum runs the same three modules, why, what and how, with qualitative and quantitative external benchmarking providing the fact base for the growth plans, and explicit alignment with the company’s existing strategy planning processes.
The eighteen week schedule is mostly two hour sessions, with stakeholder interviews in the why module, three milestone delivery weeks, and an operating company presentation in the final week. The learning journey alternates facilitated sessions with self learning, core team discussions and a faculty forum.
Scope and limitations
This is a working session deck. It sets out the format and the program design, and records nothing about which challenges the groups chose or what they concluded.
Source
This page summarises Network & Sparring aka Growth Hacks, by Institute for Real Growth, May 2021.