Understanding and utilizing the Cascade Growth Framework - part of Cascade's Strategy Intelligence suite
What is the Growth Framework?
The Growth Framework is a simple but deeply insightful way to understand the current focus of your business. It also allows you to see how your business is evolving over any period of time.
The main principle behind the Growth Framework is that businesses progress through a number of different stages as they grow and mature. The activities and outcomes that they need to focus on to be successful will change at each stage. Therefore having a strong understanding of your current stage allows you to create strategic plans for what to focus on next, to help move your business towards the following stage in its journey of evolution.
If you’re familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs then you might recognize some of the ideas in our Growth Framework. Maslow’s framework is meant for understanding the evolution of our own lives as individuals - as we move through meeting first our basic needs of nourishment & safety, through to less tangible but equally important needs such as love & belonging, before ultimately (hopefully) achieving deep fulfillment from our lives. Our Growth Framework takes a similar approach, but from the lens of business.
Businesses must first tend to their core survival needs - things like cashflow, compliance, etc. Once those needs are covered, they can look to growth with things like product launches, marketing and such like. Finally, once the business is growing, they can start to optimize and evolve their outcomes, by focusing on things like margin maximization or even creating positive external impacts through knowledge generation or charitable outreach.
Cascade’s Growth Framework gives you a tangible way to map everything that your business is doing against 35 different categories of business outcomes. Those outcomes are grouped in various ways to help you understand exactly where you currently sit in your journey of business evolution. Further, you can clearly see what changes you will need to make in order to deliver outcomes associated with higher stages of business evolution.
For example, the Growth Framework might show you that at present, your business is extremely focused on things like compliance and administration. But there's very little work happening across the organization that will help the business with new product launches or other ways to drive incremental revenue. You can use this information to start steering the business towards the right focuses over time - the Growth Framework will provide an objective and measurable way to track your success in doing so.
How does the Growth Framework work?
Cascade continually analyzes the goals in your instance, and uses a variety of details to classify those goals into their appropriate place in the Growth Framework. You can then use the Growth Framework to see what outcomes the various goals in your instance will contribute towards. Furthermore, you can apply a range of lenses and filters that allow you to view the contributions of your goals by:
- Specific Plans
- Specific Focus Areas
- Time horizons
- And a range of other filters
Like other frameworks in the Strategy Intelligence suite, Cascade will create written summaries of each category, and give you the option to ask specific questions about the goals within each category in a conversational manner.
The Growth Framework categorizes your goals into 3 different levels. Every goal will receive a categorization in each of the 3 levels.
Level 1 Categorization
The first level of categorization under the Growth Framework categorizes your goals into 1 of just 3 high level groupings. These groupings are intended to give a very high level summary of what type of outcome the organization will achieve as a result of completing those goals.
| Level 1 | Description |
| Run the Business | Contributions to the everyday critical operations of the business and represent basic things that the business needs to do to survive and maintain operations |
| Grow the Business | Help the business grow in organic or inorganic ways |
| Evolve the Business | Optimize aspects of the business, such as profit margins, organizational knowledge, etc |
Level 2 Categorization
The second level of categorization contains 9 categorizations which expand on the level 1 categorizations above.
| Level 1 | Level 2 | Description |
| Run the Business |
Business Foundations | Core elements of people, product and capital operations |
| Obligations | A mixture of internal and external obligations such as compliance | |
| Core Operations | Critical operations that relate to delivery of product or internal processes that allow the business to function | |
| Grow the Business | Organic Growth | Business growth that is derived from business and usual functions such as sales, marketing or advocacy |
| New Opportunities | Business growth from net-new actions such as the creation of new products, markets or channels | |
| Culture | Growth as it relates to the people of the business through hiring and other people initiatives | |
| Evolve the Business | Efficiency | Optimization of things such as profit margins, team effectiveness or productivity - making more of what you have |
| Business Intelligence | Knowledge generation through research, innovation and other forms of discovery | |
| External Impact | Positive impacts outside of the business, such as impacts on communities or society as a whole |
Level 3 Categorization
The third and final level of categorization contains 9 categorizations which expand on the level 1 categorizations above.
| Level 1 | Level 2 | Level 3 | Description |
| Run the Business |
Business Foundations |
Effective Staffing | Key positions are filled and staff have clearly defined responsibilities |
| Core Products & Services | Maintaining a core portfolio of sellable products and services | ||
| Working Capital | Sufficient capital remains on hand to run the business | ||
| Obligations |
Compliance | Activities are compliant with the law, regulations and market requirements | |
| Internal Controls | Appropriate internal processes and controls to maintain compliance and good operating hygiene | ||
| Core Operations |
Support & Administration | Recurring core needs of the business are taken care of | |
| Product & Service Delivery | Customers receive the things that they have paid for | ||
| Grow the Business |
Organic Growth |
Brand Awareness | Fresh customer opportunities are created as a result of marketing and brand awareness |
| Sales | Additional revenue us generated from sales activities | ||
| Customer Advocacy | Customers are satisfied and promote the business organically | ||
| New Opportunities |
New Products & Services | Net new products or services are created and made available to sell | |
| Channel & Territory Expansion | New territories, geographies, locations or channels are created to drive growth | ||
| Culture |
Ethical Business Practice | Investments in ethical business practices which increase the reputation of the business | |
| Employee Happiness | Employees are happy and thus more productive with lower attrition | ||
| Evolve the Business |
Efficiency |
Productivity | The output of individual employees is increased for no additional cost |
| Team Effectiveness | Teams collaborate more effectively together driving better results | ||
| Margin Improvement | Net profits are increased through higher revenues or lower costs | ||
| Business Intelligence |
Insights | New knowledge is created that improves the business | |
| Strategic Direction | Planning or execution of strategy via tools such as cascade.app | ||
| Innovation | Ideation and experimentation for new products or services | ||
| External Impact |
Community Nurture | External communities are positively impacted by the organization | |
| Aid & Charity | The organization directly contributes to external causes | ||
| Global Advancement | Contributions to social, political technological or scientific advancement that impacts outside of the organization |
Frequently Asked Questions
- Can a goal exist in more than 1 category in the same level?
Goals always exist in all 3 levels, however they can only exist in one category per level. In reality, many goals will impact multiple categories, however Cascade will try to determine the category with the highest correlation to the intended outcome of the goal - What types of goal does Cascade categorize?
Cascade categorizes all types of goals - including Objectives, Projects and KPIs (or however those things are named in your instance). - Can the categorization be incorrect?
Whilst the accuracy level of categorization is high, mistakes are possible. However because most of the time you will be looking at categories in aggregate rather than individual goals, those mistakes are unlikely to affect the broader insights generated. - Is the category data available in other parts of Cascade, such as reports?
Yes, you can add columns to your reports that contain the categorization data generated by the feature.