When an organisation loses its purpose, and how to find it again

The business is growing.

The numbers look respectable. The strategy has been refreshed. Someone has commissioned a rather lovely slide deck.

And yet something feels off.

A decision that used to take a conversation now takes a committee. The people closest to the customers have learnt which things are worth saying and which things will only make their day harder. The founder can explain where the organisation is going, but struggles to explain why they are looking forward to arriving.

This is one way an organisation loses its purpose. Plenty of activity. Less connection to what makes the activity worthwhile.

What is organisational purpose?

For me, organisational purpose is a shared understanding of why the organisation is worth having in the world, and who it exists to help.

You can write that down. The interesting bit is whether it helps anyone make a decision on a difficult Tuesday.

What do you turn down? What do you protect when money is tight? What happens when the efficient thing and the decent thing pull in different directions?

Those choices tell you more than the sentence on the wall.

How the drift happens

I suspect very few organisations sit down and decide to forget themselves.

They make reasonable decisions.

Add a check after something goes wrong. Build a process so the founder can stop being involved in everything. Set a target that is easier to measure than the thing everyone actually cares about.

Each decision may help. Put enough of them together without revisiting what they serve, and the organisation can become very good at continuing.

Continuing is a peculiar ambition for something people once felt brave enough to start.

Sometimes the original purpose still fits, but the way of serving it has become stale. Sometimes the world has changed and the purpose needs to change too. Going back to the beginning isn't automatically the answer.

Start with the decision you are avoiding

Before commissioning another purpose statement, I would gather a few people around one real decision.

Something important enough that the answer would change what happens next.

Then ask:

• Who is this organisation here to help, and what are they telling us now?
• What do the people closest to the work know that never reaches this room?
• Which thing are we doing mainly because we have always done it?
• What would we stop if nobody needed to defend the earlier decision?
• What would we try if we were starting today?

The useful answer may be uncomfortable. It may also be sitting with someone who has never been invited to a strategy meeting.

The receptionist is often worth talking to.

A picture can open a conversation

In 2014 I joined the word ikigai to Andrés Zuzunaga's existing purpose Venn diagram. That adaptation travelled far beyond my blog.

I didn't invent the four circles or the Japanese idea of ikigai. The diagram is a Western purpose tool, and Japanese ikigai is much broader than finding paid work at an intersection.

What interests me now is how a simple picture gave people a way to begin a conversation they were already carrying.

Organisations need those openings too. The picture can help. The conversation still has to reach a choice.

I wrote more about that in What a diagram taught me about organisations that have lost their way, and the Ikigai origin story.

Make one choice that brings it back into the work

Leave the conversation with something you will stop, protect or try.

Name who will do it. Choose when you will come back and ask what happened. Listen to the people the decision affected.

It might be a small change. Removing an approval nobody needs. Giving a customer-facing team permission to solve a recurring problem. Stopping a project that everyone privately knows has run its course.

A useful beginning has consequences.

If there is one important thing your organisation cannot quite name, bring me that thing.