3 Horizons of Growth Template
Concurrently manage current and future opportunities for growth.
About the 3 Horizons of Growth template
What is the 3 Horizons of Growth model?
As companies grow, it can be difficult to keep innovating at the same pace. Innovation is often discarded in favor of inertia. To keep up their momentum, organizations have to balance their existing business with potential growth opportunities. That’s where the 3 Horizons framework comes in.
First introduced in The Alchemy of Growth, the 3 Horizons of Growth model helps companies assess potential growth opportunities while finding ways to maintain existing business. C-suite leaders use the 3 Horizons model as a blueprint for investing in current products and services while looking to the future. But its use is not confined to the C-suite. Teams across the organization can make use of the 3 Horizons model to ensure their projects map to the organization’s goals.
What are the 3 Horizons?
The 3 Horizons represent current opportunities, future opportunities that require substantial investment, and ideas for future opportunities that can be used as experiments, pilots, or minority stakes in new businesses.
How do you use the 3 Horizons of Growth template?
Use the 3 Horizons of Growth template when you want to strategically think about your business currently and in the future. The x-axis represents time, but keep in mind that it’s not an indication of what you should be thinking about now vs. later. You should be thinking about all three horizons at the same time. You will always want to cycle between where your business is strong now, which opportunities you believe will be successful in the future, and which opportunities you’d like to explore further.
What are the benefits of the Horizons of Growth model?
Benefit 1 - Take stock of current opportunities. To start, the Horizons of Growth model requires you to make a note of all current opportunities. This exercise helps frame the rest of the model and ensure you’re aligned with your team.
Benefit 2 - Identify future opportunities for investment. The Horizons model empowers you to pinpoint opportunities to maximize cash flow. Use the model to brainstorm with your team and come up with ideas for quick wins.
Benefit 3 - Experiment and iterate. Many C-suite execs use the Horizons of Growth model to find potential areas for experimentation. Those might include research projects, pilot programs, or minority stakes in new business.
When to use the 3 Horizons of Growth model
1. To foster a culture of innovation
2. To create a framework necessary for achieving long-term initiatives
3. To identify opportunities for new business
4. To enhance business analysis and focus on potential challenges
5. To prepare a developmental plan
Get started with this template right now.
Growth Experiments Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Desk Research, Strategic Planning
Many ambitious companies are eying the future and aiming to grow. But growth decisions can be leaps of faith that are risky and costly. That’s why growth experiments make so much sense. They offer a systematic six-step method that reveals which strategies are most effective, how they’ll affect your revenue, and how they compare to your past approaches. By helping you test out your strategies for scaling your business before you fully commit, growth experiments can save you serious time, resources, and money.
Cynefin Framework Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Decision Making, Prioritization
Companies face a range of complex problems. At times, these problems leave the decision makers unsure where to even begin or what questions to ask. The Cynefin Framework, developed by Dave Snowden at IBM in 1999, can help you navigate those problems and find the appropriate response. Many organizations use this powerful, flexible framework to aid them during product development, marketing plans, and organizational strategy, or when faced with a crisis. This template is also ideal for training new hires on how to react to such an event.
Likert Scale Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, Decision Making, Product Management
It’s not always easy to measure complex, highly subjective data — like how people feel about your product, service, or experience. But the Likert scale is designed to help you do it. This scale allows your existing or potential customers to respond to a statement or question with a range of phrases or numbers (e.g., from “strongly agree” to “neutral,” to “strongly disagree,” or from 1 to 5). The goal is to ask your customer some specific questions to turn into easy-to-interpret actionable user insights.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Strategic Planning, Project Planning
Clarity, focus, and structure — those are the key ingredients to feeling confident in your company’s directions and decisions, and an OKR framework is designed to give them to you. Working on two main levels — strategic and operational — OKRs (short for objectives and key results) help an organization’s leaders determine the strategic objectives and define quarterly key results, which are then connected to initiatives. That’s how OKRs empower teams to focus on solving the most pressing organizational problems they face.
Lean UX Canvas Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, Product Management, User Experience
What are you building, why are building it, and who are you building it for? Those are the big pictures questions that guide great companies and teams toward success — and Lean UX helps you find the answers. Especially helpful during project research, design, and planning, this tool lets you quickly make product improvements and solve business problems, leading to a more customer-centric product. This template will let you create a Lean UX canvas structured around eight key elements: Business problem, Business outcome, Users and customers, User benefits, Solution ideas, Hypothesis, Assumptions, Experimentation.
Three-Hour Brand Sprint Template
Works best for:
Marketing, Workshops, Sprint Planning
Before customers will believe in your brand, your team has to believe. That’s where brand sprints work wonders. Popularized by the team at Google Ventures, a brand sprint will help your team sort through all different ideas about your brand and align on your brand’s fundamental building blocks—your values, audience, personality, mission statement, roadmap, and more. Whether you’re building a new brand or revamping an existing one, brand sprints are ideal for trigger events such as naming your company, designing a logo, hiring an agency, or writing a manifesto.