Purpose

I was speaking on a panel this week and the first question we were asked was:

"What does it mean for an organisation to be purpose led, beyond the statements on paper?"

To answer that, let me take you back to the London startup scene of the mid-2010s.

“Purpose” was a very fashionable concept back then. It seemed like every other person was reading the books “Start With Why” or “Reinventing Organisations”. Purpose unsurprisingly became a thing that my company at the time started to chase. We had to have a purpose, and it bothered us that we didn’t. I was as much as part of this as anybody else - this was in my “trying to be cool” leadership era.

Looking back it’s odd that we spent so much time worrying about this¹ because we actually had a really great purpose right in front of us.

We were a company that helped start-ups access government funding. While the details of that might seem quite mundane (quite a lot of it is about filling in forms for the tax authorities), the real-world impact of the work was exciting. We had a whole range of clients, and while you might not personally be excited by the latest developments in fintech, you might think that innovations in battery science, or educational technology were pretty cool. So on balance, it was a great place to be working. It was having a positive impact in the world.

So why did this seem like it wasn’t enough?

“Helping start-ups get government funding” somehow didn’t seem meaningful enough. It was too mundane. We imagined that out there was a purpose that represented the perfect intersection of our collective interests and skills, and the needs of our current and potential clients. If we found it, it would make everything make sense. Maybe such a thing did exist and we didn’t find it - but also, maybe it didn’t². But by believing in this possibly-existing perfect purpose, we reduced our ability to see - and be inspired by - the definitely-existing work in front of us.

I think this is the big trap when it comes to purpose. We want to make our purpose do too much!

But I don’t reject the notion of purpose. Not at all.

When we are working “for purpose” (rather than “for profit”)³, purpose matters. It’s there in the name!

“Purpose” is closely related to “impact” - in much the same way that “profit” is closely related to “value”.

For organisations working for profit, it’s reasonably true to say that “value” exists whether the organisation understands it or not⁴. In some sense, it’s already out there, in the world, in the work that you do, and the way your customers relate to that, waiting for you to investigate it. If you can formalise something about the value you create, through a short and sweet strategy statement (”We help X do Y in order that Z”) you help everyone in the organisation orient towards it. That statement doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to work as an aid to navigation.

For non-profits and social enterprises, purpose can be captured in a similar kind of strategy statement. Something short, and easy to grasp, and helpful, pointing at a high level both to what you do and why.

The “why” component matters here. There has to be a reason why we’re doing what we’re doing, as an organisation - that’s part of what makes it “work”.⁵

But the “what” but is also important. Purpose is linked to the work - to the thing that the organisation does - and I think there should be a flavour of craftsmanship to it. Think about “value”. You make money by providing value to customers, but you cannot just ship someone a box of pure “value”. It has to be in something, a product or a service. So to really care about “value” we have to care about those products or services. Whatever we are making, we have to make it with great care, like it matters to us, because that’s how the value gets in. “Impact” is the same. And purpose is what points to impact. “We have this purpose, and so we want to have these impacts”.

All of which is to say, when I think about purpose these days, I try and avoid imagining something which will somehow add sparkle and energy and meaning to everything. But instead I look for something more down to earth, more practical - something that tells us about “the widgets that we make”, and helps us distinguish good ones from bad ones.

So to answer the original question, I think being truly purpose led looks like this:

An organisation that knows what it does, and why.

I try and worry less about finding the perfect expression of that, and put more of my more about making sure everyone understands it well enough - and in a similar enough way.

1. Actually it’s not that odd because all organisations tend to project their worries and doubts and discomforts somewhere. Purpose is a pretty good target for this. Accountability is another common one. Also we were experimenting with some fairly radical self-management, in which we told people they were all potentially able to influence the company strategy - and so naturally people’s attention went there as they tried to figure out what that meant.

2. I tend to think the latter is more likely.

3. Shout out here to the ongoing difficulty of what to call the world of “organisations not ultimately motivated by profit”, the latest version of which is “the impact economy”.

4. “Value“ is the bit of your products or services your customers actually care about enough to a spend money on. A lot what any organisation makes is not “value”, but is like packaging around it. Only some of that packaging is really necessary to ship the product to you in working order.

5. Or I might say “real work”. If there is no reason for it, it’s at best wasteful, and at worst a scam. Having recently re-listened to Helen Lewis’s “The New Gurus” audio series for the BBC, I am reminded of just how many scams there are out there.