Understand the opportunity. Examine what would make it work.
Good growth decisions bring together commercial evidence, customer understanding and a willingness to question assumptions. These principles guide how we examine opportunities and help clients decide what to pursue.
Here we share the ideas, research and practical perspectives behind our work—and what they mean for the choices businesses face.
Be clear about what the opportunity should contribute: new customers, stronger margins, portfolio renewal, market access or useful learning. Judge it against that purpose, including what it would displace and the resources it would consume.
Ask what needs to be true, which explanations fit the available evidence and what would change the decision. Match the research or test to the consequence of getting it wrong and the ability to change course.
Examine whether customers can choose, buy and use the offer, and whether the organisation can deliver it. Pricing, channels, procurement, ownership and capacity belong in the commercial case from the beginning.
Deep customer understanding must lead to a market large and accessible enough to matter. Investment discipline must leave room for an emerging business with different economics. Learning from results requires examining the reasoning and execution that produced them.
We explore how changing conditions could create a different customer need or route to market, then shape alternatives and decide what can usefully be learned or acted on now.
Five selections on customer demand, decision quality, resource allocation and changing markets. Each offers a useful way into a commercial question.
Where will additional buyers come from, and can they find and buy the offer?
These books challenge assumptions about brand growth and the attention given to existing customers. Useful when a growth plan narrows its market before testing who else could buy.
What are people trying to achieve when they choose an offer, and what keeps them with an alternative?
A useful starting point for understanding adoption and improving the proposition. The scale of the opportunity and its economics still need to be established.
How do you judge a decision when the outcome also depends on uncertainty and luck?
A useful discipline for examining what was known at the time, recording assumptions and learning from results. Relevant to investment choices and leadership reviews where hindsight can conceal the quality of the original reasoning.
Do money and people follow the stated priorities?
Research on resource-allocation inertia raises a practical question for leaders: what will move to make the strategy possible? For a smaller business, the binding commitment may be a few specialists’ time rather than a large capital budget.
Which changes could alter what customers need or how the business reaches them?
A practical foundation for examining possible developments and their implications for decisions today. Useful when an investment depends on conditions that may no longer hold by the time it pays back.
Design thinking helps teams investigate a problem and develop alternatives. The Design Council’s Framework for Innovation and Designing for Growth by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie are useful starting points.
Ralph L. Keeney’s Applying Value-Focused Thinking starts with what a decision should achieve. Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma examines how the priorities of an established business can shape which emerging opportunities receive support. These inform different parts of the work and are applied with attention to the particular business.
Commercial evidence has to be examined by people who carry different responsibilities and may see different parts of the problem. We draw on organisational-learning research to consider whether the team can question the assumptions behind a plan as well as improve its execution.
Chris Argyris’s work helps distinguish those two kinds of inquiry.
Read sourceAmy Edmondson’s research draws attention to the conditions under which teams discuss errors and concerns.
Read sourceEdgar and Peter Schein’s Humble Inquiry offers a useful perspective on asking questions that make room for another person’s knowledge.
Read sourceThese ideas support how we conduct the work; they do not replace commercial analysis or the leader’s responsibility to decide. We examine what the evidence supports, what remains open to challenge and how the reasoning can become useful in the team’s normal work.
Practical thinking for leaders deciding where the next growth will come from, and what it will take to earn it.
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A service business plans to expand its network. But what if customers need fewer visits? Exploring that possibility reveals a different offer and changes which commitments make sense now.
Read the articleYou do not need a finished brief. We start with your situation, what you want to achieve and whether Sightline is the right help.