Grow: Stronger, Not Just Bigger

Most organisations measure progress by addition: more revenue, more customers, more headcount, more reach. None of those things are inherently wrong. In fact, they demonstrate success as businesses are designed to do. Maximise shareholder benefits. But they describe only one kind of development, and arguably the least interesting one.

This action is about something different. Not adding more, but going deeper, sharpening judgment, and developing the people doing the work.

Understanding, honestly, what the organisation is part of and what it does to the communities and systems around it.

An organisation can expand continuously while actually becoming less capable: more siloed, more defended against the feedback that would help it improve, further from the reality its decisions are affecting. That is not development, it’s accumulation.

We see this pattern across all kinds of sectors. A fishery that harvests at maximum yield every season until the stock collapses. Soil farmed at maximum productivity through synthetic inputs until it can no longer support a crop without them. A team pushed to maximum output until the people carrying it up and leave.

In each case, the system appeared to be performing well right up until it failed. Maximum output and system health are not the same thing, and optimising for one tends to destroy the other.

Nature does not maximise. It optimises: for resilience, for relationship, for the capacity to keep functioning well. That is the kind of development we’re discussing here.

There is a meaningful difference between an expanding and developing.

Expansion adds: more people, more products, more presence. Whereas, development grows: sharper judgment, more honest understanding of the systems the organisation is part of, and a greater capacity to hold complexity without simplifying it to the point you repeat the same mistakes.

Organisations that confuse the two tend to scale faster than their understanding of their own impact. They create problems at a distance they cannot see because they are moving too quickly. In supply chains, communities and the natural world beyond their immediate field of view, and then wonder why things keep going wrong in ways they did not anticipate.

The questions this action asks are simple but rarely easy: what needs to be more clearly understood? About the conditions you operate in. About the communities you affect. About the long-term consequences of your decisions being made now.

What capabilities are required to navigate a rapidly changing environment? The ability of people to think clearly under pressure. To make good judgments in situations they have not experienced before. To notice what is actually happening rather than what they expected to happen. And, perhaps most critically, to act on uncomfortable information rather than explaining it away.

Your organisational nervous system is the most directly relevant here. It handles strategy, sensing change, and your ability to read and respond to what is actually happening around you. Developing in the sense this ‘action’ describes is fundamentally about extending the nervous system’s range: what the organisation notices, what it can hold, what it can integrate into how it operates. An organisation with a narrow nervous system can only respond to what it already knows how to see.

The reproductive system handles legacy, scaling and your capacity to seed ideas into the future. When an organisation expands without a healthy reproductive system, it scales without carrying its original character. What made it worth building gets diluted as it becomes larger.

Your muscular system connects you to the relational world: collaboration, communities, supply chains, the people your work depends on and affects. When bones and muscle develop in relationship, the body moves with strength and flexibility. When they do not, the skeleton becomes brittle. The same is true for organisations: structural expansion without corresponding investment in the relational systems that support it leaves the organisation rigid and vulnerable when conditions change

Underneath all of this sits your DNA: your identity, your values and your long-term sense of what the organisation is for. Development without a corresponding shift in organisational DNA produces an organisation that looks different but operates the same way. The story below is, at its root, a DNA story.

Beneath the floor of a healthy forest, trees are connected through vast underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi. Through these networks, trees exchange nutrients, water and chemical signals. Established trees support younger seedlings that cannot yet reach enough light to sustain themselves. When a tree comes under stress from pests or disease, warning signals travel through the network, prompting neighbouring trees to begin producing their own defensive compounds before the threat reaches them.

This is a fundamentally different model of growth to the one most organisations operate by. Growth here is not about outcompeting what is around you. It is about developing in relationship with it.

In 1994, Ray Anderson, founder and CEO of Interface, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of commercial carpet tiles, was asked to give a speech to an internal task force about his company’s environmental vision. He had none. By chance, someone handed him Paul Hawken’s book The Ecology of Commerce. What he read stopped him.

Anderson realised, with sudden and uncomfortable clarity, that his company’s entire model was built on extracting resources, processing them with fossil fuels, and producing products that would end up in landfill. All for growth, at any cost.

He later described it as a “spear in the chest” moment. He had run a successful, profitable business for over two decades without fully seeing the system it was part of, or the damage it was doing to it.

Allowing himself to see more clearly changed everything: how Interface designed products, where it sourced materials, how it thought about waste, and ultimately what it believed a business was for. Anderson set a goal of eliminating the company’s environmental footprint entirely. Interface reduced greenhouse gas emissions by over 80 percent and cut fossil fuel use by 60 percent, while doubling sales and profits.

The growth that followed was not a result of doing more of the same but rather came from expanding his understanding of where Interface sat in a larger system, and letting that understanding reshape the decisions being made.

(Full story at Fast Company: How a carpet maker became an unlikely hero of the environmental movement.)

Carol Dweck’s research at Stanford University demonstrates that individuals and organisations who treat capability as developable through effort and honest feedback consistently outperform those who treat it as fixed.

The organisations that mature well are those where people feel safe enough to admit uncertainty, ask for help, and surface the uncomfortable observation that would most benefit the business. Where that safety is absent, capability stagnates regardless of how many training programmes are running.

Seek out perspectives that sit outside your usual frame. Invite people in who see your work differently. Commission a supplier audit not just for cost and quality but for how it affects people and places further down the line. Spend time with communities near your operations. Most organisations have a significantly narrower picture of their actual impact than they realise.

Invest seriously in developing your people, not just the organisation’s reach. The mycorrhizal parallel is worth taking literally: established trees actively channel nutrients toward younger seedlings that cannot yet sustain themselves. That is not incidental. It is how the forest maintains its capacity. The equivalent is deliberate, ongoing investment in people earlier in their development: creating conditions for them to build judgment, take on work that stretches them, make decisions and learn from what follows, and bring more of their thinking into the work rather than executing instructions from above.

This means more than training budgets and development plans, though those matter. It means asking what blocks people from learning. In many organisations the answer is the same: the pressure to perform leaves no room for the uncertainty that real learning requires. People cannot admit what they do not know. They cannot ask for help without it reading as incompetence. If your organisation has not yet done the work of Reframing how it understands mistakes and uncertainty, investment in development will hit that wall.

Move at the pace of your understanding. Expanding faster than your awareness of what you are doing and to whom tends to create problems faster than it creates value. The organisations that grow both deep and wide are almost always those that spent time building genuine capability and relational depth before they became large.

The most common failure is conflating development with progress. An organisation can be expanding in size, output and revenue while actually becoming less capable: more siloed, less curious, more defended against the feedback that would help it improve.

A second difficulty: deepening awareness of your own impact is uncomfortable. The Interface story is compelling in retrospect. In the moment, what Anderson was doing was acknowledging that his life’s work had costs he had not been willing to see. That is confronting, and it is not unusual for organisations to stop short of real inquiry when the answers start to become inconvenient.

Finally, this kind of work can slow you down in the short term. Making space for the conversations that deepen understanding rather than just check boxes takes time that could always be spent on execution. But organisations that resist that pressure consistently outperform those that do not. However, that does not make the pressure to meet shareholder expectations any less real.

Identify one person in your team who has more to contribute than their current role allows. Have a conversation with them about what they would most like to learn, and in turn, contribute to the business. Bring what surprises you from both conversations to your next team meeting.

• What aspects of the system your organisation operates within are you unaware of? What would it take to understand them better?
• Where is your organisation expanding in size or output without a corresponding growing awareness about the impact that is having?
• Are the people in your organisation developing in their judgment alongside their technical skills? What would help that happen?
• If your organisation were more like a forest than a machine, what conditions would you need to create for everything within it to get stronger, not just bigger?

Reframing shifts how you see. Experimenting tests what you find. Growing deepens both, expanding what your organisation and the people within it are capable of seeing, learning and doing when you invest in knew knowledge. The next action, Energise, explores how to build the momentum and connection that turns individual growing into something the whole organisation can feel.

Disclaimer: This post was written in collaboration with Claude AI. It was used to help research some of the stories for our examples, and sense-check that what I have written is coherent and tonally consistent.