Navigate the Swirl

CHAPTER 3Understanding Growth: Dynamics of Organizational Development

One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.

—Abraham Maslow

What does growth mean? In business, the term is used in many different ways. Broadly speaking, it means the business is expanding and improving—perhaps in terms of revenue or profit, perhaps in its number of employees or customers, perhaps in its physical footprint, perhaps in its range of products or services, perhaps in its value as a company. All these are metrics that businesses use to define and quantify growth. Growth can be slow and steady, or it can come in a sudden surge. Sometimes, if growth happens too fast, it proves to be unsustainable. As we've discussed, a business is more than its physical metrics, and if growth is to be sustained, it must become established in the social system. For an organization to grow and thrive, we must consider what “growth” means for that whole system, and how it can be skillfully led.

To take a simple analogy, think of the organization as a child. If you're a parent, you want that child to grow up in the healthiest way possible—to progress in physical, emotional, and intellectual maturity. And most of us, whether we're parents ourselves or not, have a sense of what a child needs at various points in the life cycle. We intuitively know that certain conditions are nurturing and supportive, whereas others might ...