BREAKING THE GROWTH PARADOX: The Genesis of The SØRENSEN Framework

The numbers can be extraordinary yet profoundly deceptive. Imagine a global organisation that grew its net sales by €351 million, a stunning achievement for any executive team. Yet, beneath this visible triumph, that same organisation unknowingly lost a staggering €2.39 billion in brand value. This is the organisational Growth Paradox: a seemingly successful advance in one area masking a devastating erosion in another.

My early diagnostic work, initially through what I termed the Brand Diagnostic Assessment (BDA), brought immediate light to this paradox, a phenomenon all too common yet profoundly misunderstood. It illuminated the unseen, exposing how co- and interdependent, group-wide policy decisions — often made in isolation and celebrated under the narrow beam of the Streetlight Effect — inadvertently reduced an organisation’s overall performance, eroding its true value. This was the Opaque Black Box in full effect, hiding the most critical truths.

For me, this specific client result solidified a profound and exhilarating “eureka moment.” Having long held the personal view that “there’s no such thing as impossible”, this experience, alongside many failures and a relentless push against existing conventions, solidified my conviction: I could unravel the ability to make the impossible possible. I could create the foundational power for all organisations to generate brand value with simplicity and integrity by seeing what others didn’t and daring to go where others couldn’t.

This mission was ten years in the making.

When I initially conceived the Brand Diagnostic Assessment (BDA), I realised I included customers’ invisible emotional details, which contained hidden wisdom and insights. These helped me surface why organisations unknowingly lose millions, and even billions, in brand value. This was the nascent understanding of how I could make the unseen tangible and measurable – the very core of truly increasing brand values.

However, could this methodology be universally applied? Could the Brand Diagnostic Assessment (BDA) strengthen strategies and generate worldwide brand value for all organisations? Applying the methodology to five diverse global industries – encompassing hospitality and leisure, retail and fashion, FMCG, and financial services (banking and private equity) – provided an unequivocal answer. The results consistently baselined sharp insights into precisely why, how, and where each sample organisation lost customer sales and market growth.

The most validating aspect? The customer disconnects found were often felt, or even known, internally within these organisations. When asked in correspondence, 100% of the organisations tested confirmed that these customer emotions were indeed “known-unknown” problems. What they, and initially even I, did not fully realise was the profound impact these customer disconnects had on quantifiable brand valuations.

This journey of making the invisible visible, of seeing what others don’t, is precisely why organisations, despite access to top strategy consultants, market research, ad agencies, and amazingly skilled workforces, still under-deliver organisational value when analysing and assessing a 3-5 year time frame. A typical example is the frustration of an unhappy customer, seemingly small, that significantly impacts organisational values by millions worldwide. Only invisible until you connect two or more independent but interdependent groups. Such as a returns policy change tied to a defective refund process.

This relentless pursuit to further understand and quantify the why evolved beyond the initial BDA. It led to the development of The SØRENSEN Framework, including the powerful Organisational CT Scan for deep diagnosticassessments and the Asset Efficiency Score (AES), which quantifies the financial impact of these unseen emotional customer disconnects. Early applications, like the client mentioned above, saw a 5% boost in customer loyalty and a 37% increase in group profit by simply illuminating the unseen aspects of their organisation.

This journey is about empowering brands to break their own growth paradoxes by providing the clarity and tools to make the impossible possible.