Articulate your purpose. Sounds obvious, right?

Every business I’ve ever worked with has struggled with this on some level. Sometimes it amounted to not much more than a communication hiccup, but in most cases it ended up having deep impact on the company in some way, whether that was in customer trust, talent, time to market or lost revenue.

Large corporates tend to spend quite a lot of money honing and crafting their overall vision and mission statements as part of their branding work. Startups usually opt to keep things simple, with a statement about the problem they aim to solve. Either way, that’s often where the articulation of purpose ends. 

Everyone in the organisation should be guided by this vision/mission, and all the output – from communications and marketing to the final products and services the company creates – should reflect and align with it. But altogether too often, a lot gets lost in translation.

Brand guidelines usually include detailed specifications around visual presentation and editorial tone of voice, and a start-up’s problem statement is a great jumping-off point for User Stories. Still, product teams end up in endless circular arguments over which things on the to-do list take priority, and UX and Engineering teams argue over the best ways to implement functionality. Comms and Social teams make (occasionally hilarious) gaffes. Commercial teams implement new pricing strategies that alienate customers and negatively impact revenue. Culture suffers as the company grows. Why? Because there’s gap. A lack of translation between vision and action. As Mark Earls and others have said before me, it’s far more powerful to show (through actions) than to tell (through marketing or other communications). So what does your vision actually mean, in practical terms?

This is the first lesson in my new keynote, Not Dead Yet. During my journey with cancer, I felt the pressure to make good decisions more keenly than ever before, and I realised that being able to not just say, “I want to live,” but to also articulate what I want to live for, what kind of life I want to have – to fully articulate my purpose – is the only way I can make difficult decisions about my care and feel good about them. 

I often hear, when I propose to take a few weeks to do this work, “we’re not ready for that yet, we just need to get this MVP out the door first” or “that’s not a priority right now, we need to tackle [this other issue] first.” But I promise you, tackling the work of articulating your purpose is going to help immeasurably with most of those other issues you’re grappling with – it will help ensure that the MVP is an MLP (minimum lovable product), and it will illuminate a path to addressing those other, urgent issues faster and more effectively. I call it ‘DNA’ because it should inform every part of the company and its work, at the deepest level.

As a consultant and as a speaker, I get a lot of satisfaction out of bringing this toolset and way of thinking into all kinds of organisations – it has immediate utility and improves morale and internal outcomes as much as it does customer satisfaction and revenue. That’s how we create better experiences for humans, enabling both customers and businesses to thrive, which is my (professional) purpose.