This is the first session of the leadership program. Its objectives are to understand the program and its learning journey, to get to know the other participants in an atmosphere of vulnerability and openness, and to understand the Growth Study findings and the seven building blocks.
The session runs in three parts: the background and structure of the program, storytelling circles as a way to discover the person behind the name and title, and the study findings that form the backbone of the institute’s thinking.
Key findings
- The Growth Study is the fourth major piece of thought leadership from the IRG founders. It covers more than 750 in-depth interviews with CEOs, CMOs, and their peers, more than 5,000 online survey responses, AI analysis of several thousand publications, and behavioral data on more than 3 million LinkedIn users.
- The seven building blocks split three ways: three cover what overperforming companies do differently, three cover how they work differently, and one addresses why they exist.
- Comfort with multiple business models splits 71 percent of overperformers against 39 percent of underperformers, and delivering evolving experiences 81 percent against 32 percent.
- External connectivity splits 67 percent against 39 percent, and only 50 percent of overperformers say they are good at removing internal barriers, double the underperformer figure but still only half.
- Work with LinkedIn shows overperformers are five and a half times better connected across hierarchies and three and a half times better connected across disciplines.
Story listening, not storytelling
The method is called storytelling circles, though the presenter argues it should be called story listening circles, because the point is creating space for others to be heard. When people feel listened to, they open up.
It was used as a market research method instead of focus groups, because focus groups and one-on-one interviews tend to become an interrogation, and because any account written by an interviewer carries the interviewer’s own lens.
The worked example is a positioning project for a Mars cat food brand, where the client asked for no further research because they already knew everything, with more than a meter of qualitative and quantitative reports to prove it.
Six cat owners were invited to share stories about their pets with no questions asked. They never talked about cat food. They talked about what the presenter calls the wild side of cats, the way they move, the Zen-like focus.
The insight that emerged was that there is a big cat in every little cat. It became a positioning about nurturing the true nature of cats, and then a societal platform with the World Wildlife Fund to protect tigers in the wild.
The argument for the method is that people do not lie awake worrying about wet or dry food, but they do lie awake about the health of their cat. Years later the company redefined the business it was in, from pet food to pet care.
How to run one
Groups of six or seven sit together under three rules: one person talks at a time, often with a talking stick, no questions and no discussion, and when someone finishes they give their story a title.
The facilitator supplies only a theme, such as growth, and then waits. The warning attached is that it sounds simple but requires a trained facilitator not to ask questions and not to probe when something sounds interesting.
Silence is expected. A circle typically runs about 30 minutes, and the instruction when a silence falls is not to fill it, because someone always starts talking and does so about what they want to talk about.
The reason it works is that people answer stories with stories. The presenter illustrates it with a dislocated shoulder and a brace that prompted everyone who saw it to offer their own accident or misdiagnosis story.
The application to brands is direct. Brand leaders no longer own the conversation and can only provide stimuli, so the method shows which stimuli trigger the strongest response, and what the audience wants to talk about rather than what the company wants to talk about.
The titles matter for the same reason. A title often clarifies what the essence of the story was in the mind of the person who told it, which helps interpret it through their eyes.
The what: markets, models, experiences
Abundant market thinking is illustrated by a haircare company that believed it held a 30 percent share while Amazon put it at 11 percent, because the two sides were using different market definitions.
The company’s own share was Nielsen’s definition of shampoos and conditioners in plastic bottles in supermarkets. Amazon’s covered hair dryers, curlers, and everything else bought to care for hair. Going broader still, including Kickstarter innovations and YouTube haircare channels, the team landed on a 3 percent share.
The paradox is that the smaller number is more motivating. Nobody believes they can grow much beyond a 30 percent share, but everyone believes good marketing can double a 3 percent share.
On multiple models, the session argues internal resistance rather than logic is the blocker. It took Coca-Cola more than ten years to buy a coffee retail chain, because of resistance to a new financial model, a new distribution system, and tens of thousands of employees with different needs.
PepsiCo faced the same dynamic with SodaStream. Neither move happened until each company made an internal change first: a new chief growth officer who made it a condition of appointment, and a new chief executive who had championed the idea for years.
Evolving experiences rests on the beautifully dissatisfied consumer: as soon as a solution better resolves a friction, consumers adopt it, treat it as the new norm, and expect the same standard across every category.
The how, and the why
Open culture starts from the claim that culture is not a company’s DNA but a script that sometimes needs rewriting, and that part of it is willingness to connect with the outside world.
The anticipative organization is the flock of birds rather than the oil tanker, and the barrier it addresses is the one CEOs named in a Bain study: their own dysfunctional organization and its silos.
Whole-brained teams pair data with human insight and technology with human creativity, respecting creativity and data science equally. Netflix is the example, using data insight to vary the length of its programming while linear television stayed at 45 minutes.
The seventh block is the why. Overperformers and underperformers barely differ on top line revenue as an ambition, but underperformers over-index on the bottom line while overperformers over-index on impact on people: colleagues, customers, and communities.
Cisco is the example given, reorienting the business as servers became a commodity and building an initiative around better connection between colleagues, more experimentation, and personal development.
The overarching claim is that humanized growth is the theme for all future growth. Before the pandemic, leadership teams focused on customers and capital markets, then switched to colleagues and community, and now have to create value for all stakeholders over the long term.
What participants do with it
Each building block video is followed by a question, and participants rate their own organization on the same questions used in the Growth Study survey, then see how their answer compares to the benchmark average and to overperformers.
The workbook then asks participants to explain why they gave their low and high scores, with examples, and to name a concrete action with a who, a what, and a by when.
The stated key learnings are that the program builds a business and personal humanized growth strategy, that the world is moving from shareholder primacy to stakeholder value creation, and that growth overperformers drive more humanized growth.
The optional pre-reads are Brene Brown on vulnerability, the 2011 Porter and Kramer article on creating shared value, described as the foundation of what is now called Humanized Growth, and the Net Positive manifesto by Paul Polman and Andrew Winston.
Scope and limitations
The self-scoring is exactly that: participants rate their own organization on the study’s questions, and the comparison offered is against benchmark participants rather than an external measure.
Source
This page summarises SESSION 1: Personal Intro & IRG Growth Study, by Eva Linderborg, 2024.