The missing piece for your purpose-driven organisation
Life is about constant learning for to me at the moment — I’ve stepped into the unknown in every aspect. How to build a network of mission-driven businesses that supports a local collective-based ecosystem? How to help a client transform its organisational structure from top-down to self-managed? How to play the guitar? How to say no to various requests and possibilities?
Stopping to reflect is the key to function in a state of constant learning. By doing so you can discover your unknown thought processes and integrate them into your conscious knowledge. That process leaves you with the ability to discover systemic concepts on a meta level.
Over the past three weeks I’ve been attending various festivals (aka conferences), inspirational talks and retreats within the Paris-Berlin-Budapest triangle. I’ve been discussing the necessity of shifting the paradigm around how we do businesses with some awesome and exciting people. One question that got my attention came from NEOTRIBES:
‘In an age of rapid economic transition, how do we learn to organise ourselves and our communities?’
I talk with friends, colleagues or even random people on the street (my friends sometime can’t believe me...) and hear stories about:
- a lawyer, who wants to help people but has too much work due to problems arising from the Court’s rigid and hierarchical structure,
- a conference organiser, who wants to foster knowledge exchange but had enough of her boss’s inability to activate the team, or
- a teacher who believes in the future generation but can’t bear the autocratic approach imposed by the government.
There is a something fundamentally wrong in how we organise ourselves and our communities if three very different types of ‘workers’ are experiencing very similar day-to-day problems.
The golden circle?
Simon Sinek talks about the golden circle: Why? How? What? I’m pretty sure you’ve heard about it, but if not, have a look here.
He argues that every single organisation on the planet knows what they do, some know how they do that, but just a very few know why they’re doing it. His golden circle theory became a very important inspiration for purpose-driven organisations and social businesses. And because people have an increased need for a purposeful life and meaningful jobs, it became a very important organising principle for collectives.
You can see mission-driven businesses everywhere. Just this month, the printed WIRED dedicated 8 pages just to them. There is no wonder why. If you have your purpose clear:
- you can recruit a founding team by finding the people who buy-in to your vision,
- you can always hold on to it when having troubles in decision-making,
- it became sexy to purchase from these businesses.
Reflecting on Sinek’s theory, I asked myself the question:
Is it enough to have a common purpose while running things (aka execute on the how) based on ego-driven and hierarchical working attitudes?
The is answer is simply no. Today it’s not enough if an organisation/business/group of people know why they do what they’re doing. A bunch of organisations and theories are already speaking to this. Just look at the buzz around the teal movement or holacracy. However, it’s important to recognise that these are starting points, not just new shiny toys.
The ‘how’ is equally important.
The how is an opportunity for everyone to bring their best version of themselves into the game to unlock the collective’s potential. The how is an opportunity to create processes in which everyone’s voices can be heard when heading into the unknown of creation and emergence..
We need to open up Sinek’s circles and create the below equation:
Why? + How? = What?
If you have your ‘why’ and ‘how’ in place then the ‘what’ is going to be the best possible result that a group of people can achieve together. Think about the quality of the lawyer’s decision if her passion is combined with a more reasonable workload. Think about the content of a conference if its passionate organisers were encouraged to be creative. Think about the future generation if the inspired teacher could sense and respond to the specific class she is teaching rather than have to adhere to a systematized methodology.
I want to see a world in which we all have the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ in place. I’m thinking about a fruitful network and a first satisfied client (what) because we want to work on meaningful stuff (why) and we want to do it from the heart (how). Let’s see what the unknown brings. Let’s see what emerges.
Have you encountered similar challenges? Are you having troubles solving them? Get in touch and let’s brainstorm together :)
