← One-Team Growth Engine / Insights
The whole framework, in one place
Six weeks, built in the open, one pillar at a time. Today the last two go live. Five pillars, fifteen cells, a free instrument behind every one.
Six weeks ago I published the first pillar of a framework I'd been carrying in my head for the better part of twenty-five years. I didn't publish it finished. I published it in the open, one pillar at a time, because a framework about building systems deliberately should be built deliberately and in public — not dropped fully formed and unfalsifiable.
Today the last two pillars go live. The One-Team Growth Engine is complete: five pillars, three dimensions, fifteen cells, and a free working instrument behind every one of them. This is the piece that tells the whole story at once — for the people who arrived late, and for the ones who want to see the shape of the thing now that it's whole.
Most commercial organizations don't have a growth problem. They have an architecture problem.
We engineer our products, our infrastructure, our data pipelines to the millimetre. Then we leave the commercial organization — sales, marketing, customer success, operations — to talent, habit, and the opinion of whoever speaks loudest in the meeting. We treat revenue, the oxygen of the business, as something that happens to us each quarter rather than something we design.
The One-Team Growth Engine is the refusal of that. It treats commercial growth as what it actually is: a system you can design, measure, and improve. Not a mystery. An architecture. And like any architecture, it starts with a drawing — not with hoping the building stays up.
The drawing is a grid. Five pillars, each scored across three dimensions — People, Process, Data. Fifteen cells, each scored one (chaotic) to five (engineered). Fifteen honest questions that, taken together, tell you whether your revenue engine is built to scale or merely running on luck.
Vision answers where we play and how we win — and whether that ambition is written, shared, and falsifiable, or just last year's number plus a hopeful percentage. Without it, every other pillar optimizes a direction nobody agreed on.
Language asks whether you mean the same thing when you say the same word. "Qualified," "committed," "churn risk" — if they mean different things to different teams, your CRM isn't a system of record, it's a collection of opinions, and your forecast is fiction dressed as arithmetic. The instrument is a one-page Commercial Dictionary: the words, the customer-verifiable exit criteria, the forecast categories, and the retirement list of words banned for meaninglessness.
Process is how you travel between the gates that Language defines. Its hard truth: your best rep's "way of working" is your biggest scaling risk, because it lives in one head, invisible and unteachable, and it walks out on two months' notice. The instruments — Play Cards, Upfront Contracts, Handover Contracts, a management operating system — get that craft out of the head and into the team, with the activities-you-can-actually-manage logic of Jordan and Vazzana running underneath.
Rhythm — live today — is the cadence that keeps all of it honest between quarter ends. A system that only exists on paper is not a system; Rhythm is what runs it. The meeting stack from daily to quarterly, each producing one decision. The rolling forecast that moves in small, explainable steps instead of appearing the night before the board. The week-two signals that predict the week-twelve miss. Rhythm is the pillar that switches the others on.
Culture — also live today — is the human system that outlasts any quarter. Not the posters. What your incentives actually reward and what your metrics actually watch. Most organizations measure revenue weekly and their people never. Culture's instrument is deliberately the odd one out: not a data workbook pretending trust is a spreadsheet cell, but an honest assessment — the behaviours that reveal the real culture, the incentive mirror, and the small set of people-metrics worth reviewing with the seriousness you give the pipeline.
The three dimensions are the discipline that stops each pillar from becoming a slogan. Any pillar can be talked about; the grid forces you to show it in three places. People: can your humans do it? Process: is it designed and documented, or heroic and improvised? Data: is it measured, so it's real and not just asserted? A pillar that's strong on People but absent on Data is a good intention with no evidence. The grid makes that visible cell by cell.
Everything in the model layer is free. Not free-with-a-lead-form, not free-until-the-paywall. Free. The maturity model, all five pillar deep-dives, every workbook and template, and a fifteen-question self-scan that maps your organization in ten minutes — all downloadable, all licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, take them and adapt them.
I can already hear the question: what's the catch? There isn't one, and the reason is the whole point of the framework. The model is not the hard part. Absorption is. A dictionary you download changes nothing until your people co-create it and defend it. A cadence stack is a spreadsheet until it survives the first quarter-end temptation to skip it. A culture assessment is a mirror, not a fix. The models transform in a slide; the organization transforms in quarters — and that gap, the human work of making a system stick, is the only thing worth paying anyone for. So the thinking is open, and the facilitation is the craft. That's not a marketing funnel. It's an honest description of where the value actually is.
If you take one thing from six weeks of building this in the open, let it be the scan. Ten minutes, fifteen honest questions, no sign-up. It won't fix anything — it will tell you where to look first, which is the only useful place to begin. Most organizations discover their lowest cells aren't where they assumed, and that surprise is worth more than any framework diagram.
Score yourself. Download whatever pillar your lowest cells point to. Build the drawing before you pour more concrete.
Growth is not accidental. It is an architecture — and for the first time, the whole blueprint is on the table, free, for anyone who wants to build deliberately instead of hoping the building stays up.
The complete One-Team Growth Engine — model, five pillars, instruments, and the self-scan — is open source under CC BY-SA 4.0 at oneteamgrowthengine.com. Built on the shoulders of Jacco van der Kooij / Winning by Design (the bow tie), Jason Jordan & Michelle Vazzana (Cracking the Sales Management Code), Mike Weinberg (Sales Management. Simplified.), David Sandler (the Upfront Contract), and Dave Brailsford via James Clear (marginal gains). Drafted with AI assistance, edited by the author; the framework, the opinions and the scars are mine.
THE FIVE PILLARS
VisionLanguageProcessRhythmCulture