The origin story of Ladder of Growth – and why it would not exist without artificial intelligence.
I’d been building the spreadsheet for about seven years.
Not consistently. Not obsessively. Just… adding to it. Every time I noticed a pattern in a client session – the way someone’s sleep changed, how they started showing up differently in meetings, how their relationship with authority shifted – I’d add a row. Then carry on with my day.
It started as Excel (because I think in tables and structures, always have). Then migrated to Google Docs when I ran out of patience with Excel’s formatting. Six columns across the top: a label column, then Conker, Washing Ball, Bouncy Ball, Snooker Ball, Glitter Ball – the five stages of the growth journey (what I had called the Head Trash Clearance journey) I’d been observing in clients since I developed Head Trash Clearance back in 2011. Down the left: twenty-five-odd dimensions. Sleep. Mental energy. Performance in meetings. Relationship with delegation. Social confidence. Doing new things. How people present to authority figures. Random, but real. Every single one observed in an actual human being doing actual work on themselves.
The problem was the gaps.
I knew what a Conker looked like in a meeting. I knew what a Glitter Ball looked like in a leadership conversation. In jigsaw terms the edges were done, and some of the clear features in the middle. But there were vast swathes of empty cells – the equivalent of the boring bit of the jigsaw, the grass and the sky, that you know what it is but just can’t be bothered to fill in until the very end.
I’d never had the time or the headspace to sit with it properly. In a corporate environment, this would have been an away day. Post-it notes covering every wall. A team of smart people riffing, challenging, pushing the thinking. A week later you’d come back and look at it with fresh eyes and something would have settled.
But when it’s just you – just you, doing client work, running a business, moving country (seven times, but that’s another story) – you don’t get the away day. You don’t get the smart room full of people. You just get the spreadsheet, sitting there half-finished, quietly judging you.
The day I was too ill to do anything except think
January 2025. I was ill for about a month. Properly ill – couldn’t move, couldn’t function, couldn’t sleep. My body ached, but my brain wouldn’t stop. So the laptop would come out, and I’d just… think.
I’d been using AI for a while by then. Mostly ChatGPT. Mostly for writing. But lying there, staring at my half-finished spreadsheet, I thought: what if I just… fed it in?
So I did.
I gave it a proper brief first. Twenty years of marketing teaches you that a bad brief gets you a bad output, and I wasn’t about to waste this on a vague prompt. I described each of the five archetypes in detail – how they think, how they feel, how they show up, what drives them, what blocks them. I explained the growth journey. I uploaded everything I had.
And then I said: here are the gaps. Here are the upper and lower anchors. Fill them in. Show me what the middle looks like.
And it did.
Not perfectly – I had to check, correct, push back, refine. But it did it. It spotted the patterns I’d been half-seeing for years and made them explicit. It extrapolated logically from what I knew and showed me what I hadn’t yet mapped. And then – this is the bit that still gets me – it started asking questions.
What would this look like for someone in a leadership role specifically? What are the workplace dimensions you want to pull out? How does this change when you’re working with someone on anxiety versus ADHD versus burnout?
And I was like… oh. OH.
Because I’d been working with all of these different lenses for years – the business owner lens, the executive lens, the stressed-out parent lens, the anxiety lens, the tokophobia lens – and I’d never had anything that could help me see how the same underlying model mapped across all of them simultaneously. Now I did.
It wasn’t a solo process. It was a collaboration. Me providing the knowledge, the nuance, the domain expertise built over fifteen years of watching humans change. AI providing the processing power, the pattern recognition, the capacity to hold the whole thing in its head and push the thinking forward.
It was like spending years trying to climb a cliff face – taking a step up, losing your grip, sliding back down, trying again. And then suddenly someone straps rocket-powered boots on you and you shoot straight to the top.
That’s what it felt like.
What came out of that month
The Ladder of Growth model.
Not finished – it never is, these things evolve – but the bones of it. The five-ball framework mapped across multiple domains. Leadership. Workplace performance. Mental fitness. Emotional capacity. Anxiety. ADHD. Employee growth. Each domain with its own dimensional structure, each level described with enough specificity that you could build an assessment from it.
Which is exactly what happened next.
Because once I could see the whole model, I could see the assessments. And once I could see the assessments, I could see the platform. And once I could see the platform – well. That became Ladder of Growth, co-founded with JJ Stenhouse in November 2025, operating as Ascendrix Systems Ltd.
A company. Built from a half-finished spreadsheet. With AI as the collaborator that made it possible.
What this actually means
I want to be precise about this, because I think people misunderstand what happened.
AI didn’t create Ladder of Growth. Fifteen years of observing human change created it. The model, the archetypes, the dimensions, the growth journey – all of that came from me, from my clients, from thousands of hours of Head Trash Clearance sessions and watching what happens when people clear their head trash.
What AI did was unlock it.
I had everything I needed. The knowledge, the patterns, the domain expertise. What I didn’t have was the processing power, the time, the team, or the money to turn a half-finished spreadsheet into a coherent framework. AI gave me all of that. In a month. While I was too ill to get off the sofa.
That’s the thing people need to understand about AI. It’s not a replacement for expertise. It’s not a shortcut around doing the work. It’s what happens when you finally have something smart enough to receive what you know – and help you see what you couldn’t see on your own.
I couldn’t have built Ladder of Growth without AI. That’s not false modesty or dramatic framing. It’s just true.
And that’s what AI is for.
Ladder of Growth is a psychological measurement platform for individuals, coaches, therapists, and organisations. Find out more at ladderofgrowth.io
Alexia works with founders and organisations as a fractional AI systems builder and growth architect. Work with Alexia
