This is session 1.3 of the IRG100 curriculum. It opens on the program benchmark, runs a thirteen-question quiz drawn from Hans Rosling’s Davos test, and then works through a set of tensions participants are asked to map onto their own organization’s growth.
Key findings
- The point of the quiz is that informed people get basic facts about the world wrong. The answers given include extreme poverty having more than halved, 88 percent of children vaccinated, deaths from natural disasters down by 75 percent, and most of the world living in middle income countries.
- Other answers run against the intuition that things are getting worse: women average nine years of education against ten for men, 60 percent of girls in low income countries finish primary education, 85.3 percent of people have access to electricity, and life expectancy is 72.5 years.
- Population growth to 2100 comes from more adults rather than more children, with the number of children staying at two billion, and none of the tigers, giant pandas or black rhinos listed in 1996 have become more critically endangered. The world is getting warmer.
- The session also reports the room’s own poll. On driving major change programs successfully, 52 percent agree and 24 percent disagree, while 88 percent rate themselves as effective change leaders.
The tensions
The tensions are framed as pairs rather than trends. Earth sets mankind against nature, plotting world GDP against world CO2 emissions since 1965. Population sets decline against growth, contrasting the age structure of Japan with that of sub-Saharan Africa.
World sets local against global, using the BrandZ top 100 brands. Location sets urban against rural. Identity sets culture against connections.
The remaining four are about work and technology. Technology as friend against foe, data as personalization against privacy, work as specialists against generalists, and growth itself as more against less.
What participants do with them
The exercise runs in three stages. Individually, note which tensions are relevant to your organization’s growth and say why. In breakout, take seven minutes each to introduce yourself, your business and your most important growth tensions, then discuss common themes and the actions that would address them. In plenary, summarize.
The closing reflection asks for key take-outs and what needs to be actioned, and the session ends on the humanized growth equation of colleague, customer, community and capital market value set against short termism.
The benchmark that runs alongside
The IRG benchmark has a qualitative and a quantitative half. Three to seven stakeholder interviews, chosen for influence or subject expertise, structured around the seven building blocks. And an online survey with a suggested sample of 30 to 100.
The survey sample is specified by function and level: two thirds marketing and sales including insights and communications, one third others including general management, strategy, HR and IT, split evenly across C-suite, VP or director, and manager level.
Participants get a toolset of the IRG presentation, a qualitative interview guide and a survey link, with an individual sparring session available with either founder. One participant is quoted saying the benchmark exercise helped identify the growth opportunity and drove alignment in the leadership team.
Scope and limitations
The deck is session material for a closed cohort. The poll figures are the room’s own self-assessment, and the quiz answers are presented without the underlying sources on the slide.
Source
This page summarises Decoding the world, by Marc de Swaan Arons, Frank van den Driest, January 2021.