All Growth Isn't Bigger - The Consciousness of Business Growth

All growth isn’t bigger and continuous growth isn’t sustainable. Across nature, there is a natural limit to growth. It’s about efficiency as well as the consumption and allocation of resources. By contrast, out of control growth is known as cancer – the uncontrolled growth of a tumorous mass. And unless the growth can be arrested and even reversed, the organism eventually dies.

In many businesses, growth is out of line with the principles of nature. We need a more sustainable view of growth – one that is also more conscious, finding a sustaining size for the organization and then shifting the focus to growing deeper and then broader.

Conscious Growth – Sustaining Size
In Soul of Money, Lynne Twist suggests the idea of sufficiency – finding balance with “enough”, rather than pursuing continuous growth. Here, sufficiency is a model of consistently profitable operations that support the employees, investors, supply partners and consumers – all sustainably and consciously.

Crafting a sustainable existence involves developing the capacity for self-renewal where the guiding question becomes “is this action today replicable indefinitely”. The business operates with equal concern for its impact as well as its contribution and return. In this way the sustainable organization is not just surviving, but thriving with vitality and the sense of being alive, passionate and ever learning.

Deeper growth – Greater Awareness
From here, the business organization shifts its focus from external growth of being bigger to an internal focus of going deeper and gaining greater self-awareness. By knowing itself better – as a collective organism – the business also better understands its place in the world. This expanded worldview creates an ongoing and reciprocal loop of an ever-expanding realization of the organization’s relationship with a larger existence – all without consuming more resources or creating a greater physical presence in the world.

From this deeper self-awareness and expanded consciousness, the organization can build and strengthen relationships with everyone involved with and impacted by the business. It also has the opportunity to build and nurture community in the place it chooses to do business – creating deeper roots and a greater sense of home.

Broader growth – Collective Existence
The other method of growth that isn’t about being individually bigger is about being collectively broader. The individual elephant, deer or eagle doesn’t get larger but the herd or flock may increase in population. In this way a single organism doesn’t become so large that it dominates its environment individually but rather participates within a community of its own kind in harmony and synergy with its greater eco-system so that checks and balances in that eco-system keep the whole system in balance allocating available resources as individual populations fluctuate with seasonal availability. It’s the natural order of being.

Broader growth is done with awareness of our collective existence, recognizing we are all in this together. The self-aware organization has a better understanding of how it fits into its ecosystem and what products and services best serve its customers while balancing an awareness of all the other aspects in its ecosystem.

Some of the ways a business organization might grow broadly include:

Increase your organizational knowledge and innovate – integrate new processes, methods and tools into the way you operate
Develop complimentary businesses – rather than expand into new communities, explore complimentary businesses in your existing community
Spread your business model – share with other organizations new and sustainable ways of doing business that you develop
Enhance well-being – increase the health and well-being of your organization through employee services, programs and attention to the whole person
Restore the natural environment – explore how you might operate your business more sustainably
From this perspective, the organization doesn’t necessarily get bigger as it grows broader.

Evolution as Growth
This approach suggests that once a business finds its sustainable size – where its profits create a sustaining cash flow for the organization and all its stakeholders – that growth defined as getting bigger is no longer the central objective and that the organization begins to focus on growing deeper and more broadly. Here, the business begins to focus on meaning-making that also makes money.

It is clear we are in the midst of great change and we need new ways of doing business that will take us into the future. Larry Page, CEO of Google, has asked “are you working on something that can change the world”. That doesn’t have to be the next Google or Apple to be impactful. The next round of change is likely to come from the bottom up – grassroots efforts at small businesses across the country that choose to approach business differently. Such organizations embrace evolution as growth and present the real possibility for a more positive future.