We can make assumptions that teams have already discussed what may to us feel like obvious things:
Example:
In one workshop we ran the CFO said that whilst he was passionate about their purpose, in meetings he was often the only one talking about profit and was left feeling like profit was somehow ‘bad’. He knew they needed to make a profit to be able to achieve some of the goals they had set themselves and he wanted everyone to ‘own’ the profit and the tensions between profit and purpose. Although this company saw themselves as being purpose led for some time, they said this was the first time they had had this discussion.
Sometimes it is clear an organisation is not yet ready to go on the purpose journey – part of the objective of the workshops we run is to help companies to understand what being purpose-led will actually mean in practice and what they are ready for. Some companies are ready for a deep transformational shift, for others the right thing may be to meet them where they are and help to take them forward based on what they are ready for, starting with something more emergent, for example addressing specific issues to make them a more sustainable or responsible business, or starting to change their culture to lay the ground work for future work on becoming truly purpose-led.
Example:
Herbert Jolly CEO of Best Buy waited 3 years before working on being purpose led. They spent a lot of time “making sure that the soil of the company was fertile”
“Do you know the parable of the sower? If the seeds fall on stones, nothing is going to happen. You may have perfect seeds, but they aren’t going to grow. So a lot of our emphasis was on creating a joyous, growth-oriented culture, and on creating a very human environment where people felt that they belonged, that it was a human organization, that we emphasized individual development.”
There are often two dynamics in the room at once – some people will bring a new way of thinking about the purpose of business, but others will bring a different mindset – it is important to bring empathy to both mindsets and to be comfortable with both being in the room, recognising and giving space to both. By creating space for different views it allows people to surface their own perspective.
Example:
In one workshop we ran someone stated that they did not believe the company had a duty to protect the natural world. This created a shock for some on one level – but another person was then able to state that they disagreed, and being able to surface this difference in views was helpful. The team had worked together for years and the discussion flushed out that part of the issue was misalignment between the leadership and the Board, but also that members of the Board were misaligned amongst themselves. This highlights the importance of making space for these open and honest exchanges for both Executive teams and for Boards.
We have seen people come to the work on purpose who see the world through a ‘scarcity mindset’ or who see having a purpose as limiting or constraining what they can do as a business – focusing on things they should stop doing – rather than on the opportunities to think about what they could start to do. If this happens, we seek to call out what could be limiting their mindset, get curious through asking probing questions and draw in those with different perspectives, who can see the opportunities and the potential. Through facilitation we seek to surface different viewpoints to help them to reach an understanding, positioning our viewpoint as a provocation rather than trying to ‘sell’ it to them.