Jack Murray - BlogSteal these 5 simple growth culture principles378 words (approx 2 min)

Title Image

I usually hate airy-fairy topics like this to be honest.

But to my surprise, I found I kept coming back to these five principles whenever I or teams I've worked with found roadblocks doing growth work. Whenever a roadblock came up, I realised that 80%+ of the time it's because we weren't living one of these.

These are also very solid pre-requisites for implementing a growth culture at all. If you can’t get buy-in to these, then you’ll be swimming against the tide.

With a customer-first focus, a culture that’s filled with these mindset principles will create the environment for amazing growth.

Steal these from me. Lift and shift them to your organisation or growth team or whatever. Adapt them. Iterate on them.

Just please don’t waste your time with a 10+ person, 2hr+ workshop coming up with your own from scratch. Take these (or someone else's) and then discuss the edges and the application of them in your business.

5 Growth Culture Principles

  1. Action-oriented
    Perfect is the enemy of good. The reality is that only what gets shipped is what matters to customers - and what has tangible impact on the business. Growth thrives on taking action, learning from the results of that action, and iterating forward. Effort and impact are often asymmetric.
  2. Curious
    Open-mindedness and a love of learning and open-mindedness. Dive weirdly deep down data rabbit holes and find gold nuggets for testing. Forward momentum curiosity is not a blocker, it asks why something is what it is paired alongside some hypotheses that can be tested.
  3. Data-informed
    “In God we trust. All others must bring data” (W. Edwards Deming). Back your opinions with evidence. Data helps pull clarity out of noise. Note that this is not data-led nor data-driven - data shines light on potential paths ahead, it doesn’t itself create direction to travel.
  4. Creative
    Think flexibly and unconventionally. Connect, learn about, and blend different disciplinary perspectives. Consider human psychology, heuristics, emotions, and the fact we’re irrational creatures. Make beautiful things.
  5. Mischievous
    Challenge assumptions, especially long-held ones. Break some rules, or things that aren’t really rules but feel like rules. Flirt with boundaries and question the unquestioned. Take leaps of faith against the grain and your own judgement.