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Brain Circuits
Are you practicing the three key steps to scaling up?
Less than 5% of new ventures succeed in scaling up. Here’s how to get it right, and a checklist to keep you on the path to growth.
Three key steps
Our research on three fintech scale-ups revealed that they succeeded thanks to their ability to interpret information and share that understanding across the business through the following practices:
- Scoping: Identifying new opportunities
Scoping practices help identify which trends, customer feedback, regulatory shifts, or competitive moves are relevant for scaling and which to ignore. The most successful firms in our study built mechanisms to coordinate internally, share insights, and keep up with evolving market conditions.
- Interpreting: Sensemaking signals
Once trends are identified, firms must interpret them by investing heavily in practices that encourage dialogue, reflection, and sensemaking. This could involve collecting relevant data to support scaling efforts, implementing monitoring systems to track user behaviors, or identifying patterns relevant to customer acquisition that signal untapped or emerging needs. This ability to turn scattered feedback into coordinated organizational action is central to a venture’s interpretive capacity.
- Enabling: Making interpretation actionable
Interpretation only matters if it informs action. Enabling practices ensure that new insights about user behavior, trends, or product offerings are visible and utilized across the entire organization, informing hiring, resource allocation, product development, and market-entry decisions. Organizations must also focus on their governance of information flows and decision-making processes by building internal structures, such as cross-functional teams and bridging roles that support the continuous gathering, interpretation, and diffusion of external knowledge.
Use this checklist to make sure you are on the right path to scaling:
- Do we create spaces for interpretation (not just execution)?
- Are we staying open-minded to new market segments and products?
- Are we gathering external data and using it (however ambiguous) to question decisions over new and existing products or services and test new concepts?
- How do we encourage internal dialogue about trends, signals, and their implications?
- Do these signals and the resulting discussions guide our decision-making?
- Is our growth accompanied by appropriate governance at every stage?
Key takeaway
By embedding interpretation in their daily practices, successful ventures cultivate interpretive capacity as a collective, distributed organizational process that supports their scaling efforts.
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