Case Study: Setting company mission using Design Thinking
A clear mission for the company is crucial for ROI, culture, operations, and positioning of your company. In this article, I’m going to explain how to use Design Thinking techniques to set up the mission statement that everyone believes in, and that will guide your company at scale.
Have you ever been to a labyrinth without light? In Fondazione Prada in Milan or somewhere else? If you had, you probably remember those strange feelings of disorientation.
There are two ways to get out of it. The first one is to run as quick as possible. You will quit pretty fast, with a broken nose, but you will leave. In such a way, you could deliver something to the market extremely fast. Maybe even something valuable. If it’s not, you can enter that labyrinth one more or several times to learn how to run without the vision.
Another way is to move very very slowly, taking steps one by one, trying each time to choose the right direction. In such a way, you can quit the labyrinth too late. When all your market “moved to another room to enjoy another piece of art.”
There is a third way. You can fart in the labyrinth and wait for the guard who will take you out. But it’s cheating.
The right answer here is to run and sneak by rotation. But to do so, you have to turn the light on.
Turning the light on.
Last two months, I took an active part in the process of reshaping existing operations at the company, which I love to work for. To do so, I made several strategic session for today. There was a third try of fixing the Mission for us. But this time, with the support of Irina Chunyak (HR adviser) and Dmitry Simonov (our CEO) we’ve tried to do this using a Design Thinking approach. Together we involved 60 employees in the process and facilitated workshops in such a way that kept everyone on the same page.
Setting up of the process.
Design Thinking is an approach to solve the issues smartly. So we had an issue, and we decided to solve it with Design Thinking.
To set up the team, we run a couple of activities. “Team Leap” to know each participant of the multidisciplinary team better. Understand the working style and development goals of each other. And “Mission Countdown” to set a shared goal of our existence.
Team Leap
Here is how Frog company explains the process:
You gather the team in the room and hand out the team lead worksheets. Describe the goals of the activity. In essence, we’re going to be working together a lot, and before we get in too deep, let’s establish our team working norms to get to know each other better. Then briefly describe the sections. The first is my working style, where people share their working styles and personality. Like, I love to collaborate on frameworks and the big idea, but when we get into the details, I like to work late so I can focus. The second is my development goals, where you share things you’d like to get out of this program, beyond what the business or the client has asked for. For example, I’m trying to improve my client presentation skills, so I’d like opportunities to present and feedback on how I do. And the third is your life beyond. What should we know about your other commitments? It can be anything from, when you get in the morning to things we need to plan around, like vacation time. And finally, think back to past projects. Are there any pet peeves you’d like to share with us? Keep it friendly, but if it really bugs you when people show up late to meetings, let us know. Then, ask everyone to take 10 minutes to fill out the form, and you should too. After those 10 minutes are up the next step is individual share -outs. Limit the share-outs to no longer than 5–7 minutes per person and ask the group to hold questions.
As a facilitator, I recommend you gather post-it notes of themes as you go, and definitely capture any time off dates on post-its. After everyone has shared, the team then completes the team leap poster together. The poster can be pre-filled with known program dates and each team member and their roles.
Mission Countdown
It’s a 45 min activity.
As you go through this framework, you have here 16 lines to fill in. Then you’ve to cut it to eight lines. And at the endpoint, you don’t have the formula anymore. You’re just looking for the four most important words. While these steps are tightly time-boxed, between each, there’s a short share out. The share outs are essential because you do this in small groups, and you want everybody to hear the terms that are coming up for all these mission statements. You want people to be able to steal from each other. In the final ten minutes or so, bring the groups together and discuss the ideas and priorities that emerge from reducing those goal documents down to those four-word statements. Select the statement which best expresses your team’s mission. Then write it large on the wall or a whiteboard and refer back to it frequently. At this point, you have a mission statement that should help orient your team around the long view of your program. Like “Accelerate Health Through Relationships.” A good mission statement should align the team on the goal, and it should be memorable throughout all stages of design and guide the work for all the disciplines on your team. It should also help your teammates communicate what the program is about with other parts of the organization. In a few days, hide the mission statement and see if anyone can remember it. If not, do the activity again.
Next Step
We got five teams, and as a result of these two activities, we got five different mission statements. We gather all employees in one room to pitch them the result of the previous session.
After that, they had voted for the best ideas using numbers 1, 3, 5, and 8. So each voter had to think very well which idea is the best (8), which one is good enough in the case of implementing (5), which one is “yes, but…” (3), and which one is “so-so” (1). And one more restriction: idea-winner could not have more than 15% of “1”. Yeah, its a bit holacracy approach, but we really want to shift ourselves to Teal-minded type of firm.
And one more tip. To make voting really useful, you have to know how each participant has voted. It could help you to find trends between different departments or specialists votes. (We have missed to do so, so lesson learned).
Anyway, whichever approach you choose, you have to be very attentive to the meanings of each word in your statement.
It has to be a bit crazy and challenging. You always have to have something to achieve. Don’t worry if your Mission sounds not so cool or if it is not ideal. It could be changed or transformed in the future. You have to pin something today to start your journey. You need this starting point to have the unequivocal right answer for the question: how exactly you should act in a particular moment: “to run or to sneak” to achieve your goal.
How Mission statement works?
Clear Mission, in general, answering two questions:
WHAT exactly you want to achieve and HOW?
Your Mission always has to be considered from the two points of view. Upstream and downstream: what it means for the market, stakeholders, or customers, and what it means for your company. Anyway, it is always about the values and mindset.
The most exciting part — is how your Mission affects your company.
- How, what you sell and whom to?
- How does your marketing have to operate?
- How do you have to build your working processes?
- What culture do you have to cultivate?
- What is your attitude toward innovations?
- How do responsibilities have to be shared across the company?
If you have any questions or thoughts, feel free to share it
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