ROUND 3 | OCTOBER 12–16, 2026

This Week’s Theme: The Way of Weaving

Last week, we introduced the model used to achieve Integrated Growth and began exploring strategies for turning that model into a method.

The model draws on the familiar Celtic symbol of intertwined movements. In our case, those movements are The Way of Seeing, The Way of Weaving, and The Way of Embodying.

Day 1: Four Strategies of The Way of Weaving

We explored The Way of Seeing and its four strategies:

• Construct Framing Questions to Open Possibilities
• Engage Your Core
• Engage Three Types of Leaders
• Make the NEWCO™ Explicit

What stuck with you? What did you put into practice? I'd love to hear from you.

This week, we turn to The Way of Weaving, where people, places, and things connect across different fronts to generate growth for the business, the people involved, and the larger economy.

It brings to mind a simple phrase from E. M. Forster's Howards End: “Only connect.”

In many ways, The Way of Weaving is one of the most mysterious and neglected aspects of growth. Yet it is also one of the most powerful levers for igniting it.

Neglect weaving, and growth can stall. A promising business idea or carefully crafted strategy may generate excitement, only to fizzle out. At worst, the initiative fails, and the people behind it pay the price.

Practice weaving well, however, and momentum builds. Connections begin to produce positive outcomes beyond what anyone anticipated.

Think of it as backstage at Disney. The magic audiences experience depends on countless carefully coordinated actions and connections behind the scenes. Some are orchestrated by Integrated Growth Leaders. Others emerge naturally when Integrated Growth becomes a habit.

The opportunity is to make that kind of weaving part of how you work, for your business, your customers, your colleagues, and yourself.

This week's four strategies are:

• Leverage Needs, Seeds, and Friends with Headaches
• Make the Complex Feel Simple and Meaningful
• Construct Triple Plays
• Tap Unusual Suspects and Integrative Passages

As you work through these strategies, keep your Integrated Growth Journal nearby. Look for connections you may have overlooked, opportunities to help others, and ways to turn those connections into shared growth.

Let's begin.

Day 2: Leverage Needs, Seeds, and Friends with Headaches

The Way of Weaving

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own.” - Henry Ford

Growth opportunities often emerge when you connect what people need with what you already have and who can help.

The secret to tapping the Hidden Treasures in your networks is to use them well, not just for your own benefit, but for the benefit of others and the larger purpose of the business.

Where do you start?

• ‍Look for needs. Identify unmet needs in your company's internal and external markets. Then find ways to connect your growth goals and projects to meeting those needs.‍
• Look for seeds. Identify early signs of growth that are already moving in a positive direction. Build on what is working rather than assuming everything needs to start from scratch.‍
• Look for friends with headaches. Talk with people connected to your business who trust you to help address their challenges. Choose people who are willing to collaborate and invest in a mutually beneficial outcome.

These don't have to be personal friends. Customers, partners, suppliers, and colleagues can all become trusted collaborators when you approach them with genuine interest in their needs.

The key is to look beyond what you want to accomplish and ask where your goals intersect with someone else's needs.

Today's Actions

Remember: Identify a persistent need or headache affecting your company, customers, or colleagues. Operations can be a useful place to start.

Act: Look for a ray of hope, an exception, or a small success that offers a way forward.

Who, what, where, and when does this positive exception occur?

How could you build on that seed and turn it into fuel for improvement, innovation, and growth?

Write down what you discover.

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Day 3: Make the Complex Feel Simple and Meaningful

The Way of Weaving

“The only simplicity worth a straw lies on the other side of the complex, not the kind that never noticed the complexity.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The challenge isn't to eliminate complexity. It's to make the connections clear enough for people to act.

Growth involves change, and change in a business rarely happens in isolation. Businesses have many moving parts, interdependencies, competing priorities, and people with different perspectives.

As these elements shift, new opportunities emerge, but so do new strains and complications.

The job of an Integrated Growth Leader is to recognize and manage that complexity while helping others understand how it connects to their own worlds.

The trick is to make the path forward feel understandable, relevant, and meaningful.

For example, when explaining a growth initiative, translate its goals and approach into the language of the people you need to engage.

Use numbers to demonstrate the logic to a CFO. Use customer feedback to show its relevance to marketers, designers, and customer service employees. When working with customers, start with their needs and headaches, then explain how your initiative can help address them.

The underlying strategy may be complex, but people need to see where they fit, why it matters, and how they can contribute.

This may sound like common sense. Yet many growth initiatives become so absorbed in their own ideas that they overlook what others need to understand before they can participate.

As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. observed, “The only simplicity worth a straw lies on the other side of the complex, not the kind that never noticed the complexity.”

Meaningful simplicity comes from understanding the complexity first.

Today's Actions

Remember: Choose three influential people whose support or participation you'll need to move a growth initiative forward.

Act: For each person, explain the need, the goal, how the initiative will work, and its benefits in language that resonates with their perspective.

What will make the logic clear to them?

Perhaps it's a set of numbers, a customer story, a physical model, a demonstration, or a memorable metaphor.

Don't assume the same explanation will work for everyone. Find the connection that makes the opportunity meaningful to each person.

Day 4: Construct Triple Plays

The Way of Weaving

“These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.” - Steve Jobs  

The best growth moves create distinct wins for people, the business, and the larger economy.

A Triple Play in business is a single move designed to generate value for three interconnected groups: the people directly involved, the business, and the wider economy it touches.

Each group gains something real and distinct. No person or group is treated merely as a cost to someone else's success.

Consider the iPhone. One person values its convenient camera. Another appreciates its extensive ecosystem of apps. Someone else values having multiple tools in one device, while another is drawn to its design.

One solution meets multiple needs. As Apple grows, its ecosystem can grow too, creating opportunities for app developers, retailers, service providers, and others.

Amazon Prime offers another example of a service that brings multiple benefits together in one offering.

Triple Plays don't have to be technological. Think of the triple play in baseball: three outs are achieved through a series of connected actions that work together as one coordinated play.

The business equivalent requires you to understand different needs deeply, design solutions that meet them simultaneously, and build relationships and business models in which one successful move creates opportunities elsewhere.

When the elements reinforce one another, the whole becomes more valuable than the sum of its parts. Such solutions can also be difficult for competitors to replicate because their strength lies in how everything works together.

That is the spirit of a Triple Play: bringing distinct benefits together in one integrated solution.

Today's Actions

Remember: Take a growth idea you're currently considering and imagine what it would look like as a Triple Play.

Act: Identify the players involved and what each needs to gain.

Then ask yourself:

• What features and benefits would make the solution valuable to each group?
• How could those features work together seamlessly?
• How would the connections reinforce one another operationally, financially, and through marketing and sales?
• How would the solution create growth beyond the immediate transaction?

Look for a move that creates several meaningful wins at once, rather than solving one problem while creating another.

Day 5: Tap Unusual Suspects and Integrative Passages

The Way of Weaving

"The Strength of Weak Ties" - Mark Granovetter

Some of your most valuable growth insights may come from people and places you wouldn't normally think to ask.

In network science, Mark Granovetter's influential work, The Strength of Weak Ties, explores how acquaintances and connections between separate social networks can provide access to new information and opportunities.

When you rely only on your usual contacts, even highly knowledgeable ones, you risk hearing familiar information and reinforcing existing assumptions.

Stepping outside your usual networks can introduce perspectives and connections you would otherwise miss.

I've found some of my greatest insights about companies by speaking with people such as heads of maintenance and executive assistants. These conversations opened up new worlds and revealed connections that weren't obvious from the executive level.

In another example, we brought together a pharmaceutical company, an energy company, an aerospace company, and a government agency to examine their innovation processes in new ways.

They discovered more common ground than they had expected. At the same time, their different perspectives challenged their assumptions and opened up new possibilities for designing and executing innovation and managing risk.

This is where Integrative Passages come in.

On the NEWCO™ map, introduced in The Way of Seeing, Integrative Passages are connecting routes across networks that growth leaders can use to bring different parts of a business together.

They often connect the business side of an initiative, including its financial and technical dimensions, with its human side throughout the project's life.

One example is engaging customers as an extension of your internal and external salesforce, creating connections that help the business understand needs, build trust, and generate growth.

The point is to look beyond familiar boundaries. The person with the most useful insight may not be the most obvious expert, and the most promising connection may come from a network you rarely engage.

Today's Actions

Remember: Identify two people, places, or things that could offer an unusual perspective on a growth challenge or opportunity.

Choose one from inside your company and one from outside it.

Act: Reach out. Ask questions. Explore what they see that you might be missing.

Pay attention to the connections that emerge from those conversations. One unexpected insight may lead you to an entirely new network of possibilities.

Day 5: Turn Connections into Growth

The Way of Weaving

Integrated Growth happens when connections become meaningful action and create value beyond any one part of the business.

Throughout this week, we've explored four strategies for weaving people, resources, ideas, and opportunities together:

• Leverage Needs, Seeds, and Friends with Headaches.
• Make the Complex Feel Simple and Meaningful.
• Construct Triple Plays.
• Tap Unusual Suspects and Integrative Passages.

Each strategy invites you to look beyond isolated resources, individual needs, and familiar ways of working.

A persistent headache might reveal an opportunity to build on a small success. A complex initiative might become possible once its purpose is meaningful to the people involved. One carefully designed solution might generate several distinct wins. And a conversation with an unexpected person might open a door to an entirely new network.

The common thread is connection.

But connection alone isn't enough. The real opportunity lies in what happens when those connections are used to create something valuable for the people involved, the business, and the larger economy.

That is the work of weaving.

Today's Actions

Remember: Look back at the four strategies from this week. Which one offers the greatest opportunity for growth in your current situation?

Act: Identify one connection you could make or strengthen today.

It might mean bringing two people together, connecting an unmet need with an existing resource, explaining a growth initiative in a more meaningful way, or reaching beyond your usual network.

What would it take to turn that connection into action?

What value could it create for others as well as for your business?

Record your answers and your next step in your Integrated Growth Journal.

Bonus Action

Look at a growth initiative you're currently working on.

Where are connections already creating value? Where are important connections missing? And what might be possible if you approached the initiative as a weaving challenge rather than a collection of separate tasks?

Write down what you discover.

You may find that the next step in your growth journey isn't acquiring something new. It may be connecting what you already have in a different way.

Keep Connecting

The Way of Weaving reminds us that growth rarely happens in isolation. It emerges through the relationships between people, resources, ideas, and opportunities, and through the actions that bring them together.

The more deliberately you make these connections, the more opportunities you may uncover to create value for your business, the people around you, and the larger economy.

Keep your Integrated Growth Journal close. Notice the needs, seeds, and unexpected connections around you. Experiment with new ways to bring them together.

And remember E. M. Forster's simple instruction: “Only connect.”

Next week, we'll explore The Way of Embodying and how Integrated Growth becomes part of the way we lead, work, and live.

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