Is It Time to Change How We Think About Purpose?
Conventional approaches to organisational purpose are often static, and find their expression in metaphors such as our ‘north star’. In a more crisis-prone environment, however, we are frequently forced to redefine what success looks like in the first place. Paul Skinner, author of The Purpose Upgrade and Collaborative Advantage, believes we therefore need more dynamic guiding narratives that make purpose the ultimate renewable resource for enterprise.
“Past performance is not a guarantee of future success. When we’re unable to switch to new stories to match the demands of changing circumstances, the once-valuable conscious lens of purpose can become a dangerous set of unconscious blinkers.”
Re:purpose
We tend to think of purpose as a constant, but we may be better off thinking of it as a dynamic capacity that is always susceptible to an upgrade. We are often at our most purposeful when something goes unexpectedly wrong, forcing us to re-prioritise altogether. As President Zelenskyy memorably said in the early days of his country’s invasion: ‘Ukraine did not seek greatness. But Ukraine has become great.’
Our most significant successes have often been forged in difficult times. Our collective response to World War II, for example, led to the creation of the United Nations, new forms of global cooperation, and new social contracts between governments and their people. It also opened the doors to decades of economic growth and rising prosperity. And many of our most notable businesses were created during downturns, including over half of the Fortune 500 companies currently in existence.
Overcoming our blind spots
Past performance is not a guarantee of future success. When we are unable to switch to new stories to match the demands of changing circumstances, the once-valuable conscious lens of purpose can become a dangerous set of unconscious blinkers, blinding us to now more important realities.
This explains why we may respond badly to threats that we have not previously experienced and that fall outside of our prior scope of reference. Arguably we are similarly slow across society in responding to the climate emergency, the collapse in environmental resources, and the challenge of extreme inequalities.
The phenomenon also explains how many organisations become fragile in the face of the psychological effects of their sunk costs, the plan continuation biases of their leaders, or the progress traps through which prior success itself becomes the cause of future failure. The winners of one story become the losers of another, unless they are able to make the switch to the new narrative. Kodak did not fail because another company invented digital photography; Kodak invented digital photography, but it failed because it was so addicted to film – and so rooted in its existing assumptions and ways of working – that it was unable to build a mobilising vision of success around the new technology.
A new era of enterprise adaptation
In environments of change, we learned to innovate, first incrementally and then more disruptively, often by combining elements from different sources.
With the arrival of the internet and digital communications, we have learned not just to innovate but to transform our organisations and how they operate.
We are now living and working in times that are so interconnected in their opportunities, and interdependent in their threats, that I believe we need to get much better not just at innovation and transformation, but at rooting these processes in deeper shifts of purpose. This may often come to redefine the success we are striving for in the first place, opening the door to new stories while inevitably closing down the ones we need to leave behind.
Business as unusual
A study led by EY and featured in the Harvard Business Review found that the top 20 corporate turnarounds of the past decade have involved purpose-level change.
“In 1929, Paul M Mazur proclaimed that we needed to move from a culture of needs to a culture of desires. Arguably, this gave birth to the modern approach to marketing. But the pendulum may now need to swing back the other way as we move from manufacturing spurious consumerist wants to addressing the deeper needs of our stakeholders.”
One of my favourite examples of such change is DSM: a former coal mining business that has ultimately become a sustainable food business, working to fix the world’s broken food system by tackling its most pressing failures. While DSM originally stood for Dutch State Mines, the acronym now informally stands for ‘Do Something Meaningful’, and DSM’s business goals include closing the micro-nutrient gaps of 800 million people, enabling double-digit climate emissions reductions in agriculture, fighting obesity with natural alternatives to sugar, and lifting 500 million smallholder farmers out of poverty.
Revisiting the fundamentals
In 1929, the Wall Street Banker Paul M Mazur said to the Harvard Business Review that we needed to move from a culture of needs to a culture of desires. Arguably, this gave birth to the modern approach to marketing. But the pendulum may now need to swing back the other way as we move from manufacturing spurious consumerist wants to addressing the deeper needs of our stakeholders. In marketing, this may mean upgrading our purpose from making the attractive necessary to making the necessary attractive.
We do not know the degree to which the climate emergency will unlock greater global cooperation or ultimately lead to increased international conflict. We cannot be sure of where the cost of living crisis will open the doors to fresh breakthroughs or simply drive more retrenchment. And it is hard to predict how far new technology will finally ease the pathway to the automated luxury predicted by John Maynard Keynes, or end up leaving us more rather than less exposed to our biggest threats.
“The top 20 corporate turnarounds of the past decade have involved purpose-level change.”
But we likely can anticipate that as such questions play out. They will continue to create rapid, extensive and often profound changes in the priorities of the people we serve. Repurposing around these changed priorities may represent the biggest opportunity available to us.
Achieving this may require us to take off our organisational hats while looking at the world afresh from a more neutral perspective, free from potentially limiting assumptions. It will require us to ask what is most needed, and how this can best be achieved, before we consider what role we can therefore best play in enabling our stakeholders to achieve the changes they seek.
In Buddhism, there is a tradition of posing questions designed to empower us to find our way to a new story of understanding. Such a provocation is known as a kōan.
A question I have found useful to pose to groups in recent times is “What if, rather than trying to lead the best businesses in the world in your domain, you instead sought to create the best businesses for the world?”
What could your response to this mean for your stakeholders today? And what might it mean for your business or brand?
Author: Paul Skinner, author and founder of MarketingKind
Paul Skinner is the author of The Purpose Upgrade: Change Your Business to Save the World (and Change the World to Save Your Business), published by Little, Brown Book Group and Hachette Audio in 2022. He also wrote Collaborative Advantage: How Collaboration Beats Competition as a Strategy for Success, in 2018. Paul is the founder of MarketingKind, a membership community of marketers dedicated to better advancing humankind through practical outcome-oriented gatherings and ongoing collaboration. He is also a Senior Adviser at Future Strategy Club.