Why many organisations have no explicit purpose
I made a New Year’s resolution for 2023 to formulate a few thoughts on a regular base in the tension between my perspective on the world and my work. Let’s see where the journey goes …
All just buzzwords
Purpose is not only a big trend in employer branding but, in my personal experience, also a real need among many employees. We usually mean the reason, the why or the right of our actions to exist, especially in the context of work and business in companies.
In job interviews we at stadtraum GmbH almost always ask whether a candidate lives to work or works to live. There is no right or wrong with this question. Even the determination of one or the other is not really interesting for us. It is the explanations that usually follow all by themselves that we draw on. We then talk a lot about what the now banished buzzword from the last decades “work-life balance” tried to capture.
Increasingly flexible working models and demands that can no longer be tied to rigid time structures demand a rethinking of these definitions. If a server goes down late at night or early in the morning, the users expect us to act and not insist on our sleep. But does that make sense?
Sense and nonsense of economic activity
The exciting thing about sense, I think, is the everyday feeling. It is concrete actions that seem sensible or senseless to us, as Christian Uhle also writes in his book “Why all this?”. I don’t know, however, whether that also has to mean that every action has to seem meaningful.
Looking at the big picture, I always ask myself whether all this is then a meaningful action or whether we would be better off leaving it alone and putting our energy into something else, hopefully more meaningful. If you don’t have an explicit meaning, the answers then often hide in the fog of meetings and tasks that seem more or less meaningful in themselves.
Does a meeting on Friday afternoon make sense, when everyone is already thinking about the weekend, or is it still doing the tasks that were left over from the week?
Implicit purpose is usually deep in the history
When my father founded stadtraum over 30 years ago, it was a time of shaping. The 1990s in particular were marked by new planning challenges in eastern Germany and Europe. Whether the challenges were solved in a meaningful way remains an open question.
At that time, stadtraum was initially active as a planning office. It quickly added the distribution of parking ticket machines and then parking space management. Was this acting according to principles? “The opportunities were on the street”, so I was told. Did they want to grow at any price? I don’t know. Since then, the latter two business units in particular have financed new technological developments. Software development has existed at stadtraum for about 15 years.
Three of the 15 years I had the privilege to play a major role in shaping. It is important to me not to use this privilege simply for the sake of being able to design, but to create concrete meaning. One example of this is the mobility revolution, which we want to help shape not only in terms of planning but also with the product mobilet.de as a MaaS solution.
A different world needs a different purpose
A lot has happened in the last 15 to 30 years. Today we think of a different world and call it VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) or even BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible). To enter this world with a constant purpose seems out of place to me. The only constants are change and values.
An example of this is sustainable management. For example, I don’t find it sustainable to distribute profits to shareholders. But investing the same money in employees is. Here again, nonsense and sense are hidden in the actions. I would not automatically define economic sustainability as a value, because it is not concrete enough for me, but rather something like “reinvest all profits” as a value.
Every now and then we start an attempt to make our sense explicit. There are enough tools for that. In some teams, after four hours of the Ikigai workshop, the result is that our meaning is “community”. A result that takes four more hours to understand. I interpret it partly to mean, for example, “learning from each other”.
In our projects there are sometimes phases in which the only sense seems to be to bring the project to an end. What we wanted to achieve with the project then lies in the distant future. Fortunately, there are now colleagues who keep reminding us what problem we are actually trying to solve.
Take-Away
The world has changed a lot in the last 30 years and will continue to do so. Making sense of it is getting harder and harder. In the end, it comes down to taking responsibility for processes — to be outcome-oriented instead of output-oriented. For this, however, continuous reflection on the meaning and purpose of our actions is indispensable.
Even at the end of this text, I ask myself whether all that has been written before makes sense or whether those who read this see any sense in it. In the end, it is precisely the implied meaning that we all want to interpret. There remains the hope that it exists, even if it is not immediately recognisable. I am curious to see where our search for a more explicit meaning will take us. What are we needed for? What would serve that Purpose most right now? Perhaps this blog can serve as a prototype, in which case it is now up to the customers/readers to provide feedback. I am curious about the feedback.
You can find the original german version of this article on LinkedIn. I’m always happy to connect and discuss via LinkedIn.
