7. Defining How your Organisation will deliver its Purpose

Strategically defining what your organisation delivers and crucially, how it does so is critical to achieving the quickest, most effective way of enacting your Purpose and reaching your strategic goals.

Most organisations have great people working hard to achieve the best for themselves and their teams within their area of expertise. This, however, can often mean that departmental and individual performance is the focus, rather than the total value created throughout an organisation.

As a result, an incredible amount of capability and capacity is consumed in misdirected efforts, siloed working and the enormous amount of management associated with these. This is not only frustrating for those involved but significantly reduces the effectivity of the whole.

To avoid this, its important to think structurally about delivering value to the Organisations internal and external stakeholders; creating a clear linkage between WHAT the Organisation does and WHY it does it, its Purpose. As depicted in the diagram below.

HOW you create and deliver value

Using the Purpose as the guiding ambition, first start with thinking about HOW value should be created and delivered. It is what you SHOULD DO, not what you already do and it is certainly not who does it. Avoid simply naming departments.

This can be a challenging task and will require consideration on both inside the organisation and from the point of view of those that benefit from its hard work.

Internal considerations

•       Moral / ethical values and aspirations

•       Environmental aspirations

•       Social aspirations

•       Development of capabilities (People & Technology)

•       Approach to adaptability and agility

External consideration

•       How today’s Consumers of your products/services define value

•       Who your potential audience are and what they want/need

•       How you want external stakeholders to view you

•       Social, financial and/or political trends

•       New technologies or thinking

Existing paradigms may well need to be broken. Embrace this.

It is good practise to define HOW you intend to deliver the Purpose at the same time as you agree the Purpose itself. Leadership representing all areas of the organisation should continue to collaborate to ensure understanding and agreement on the approach.

Ensure strategic level thinking using the considerations above as inspiration. You are looking for a small number of HOW statements that will sit underneath the Purpose Statement. If you have more than 6, look for synergy and check they are not too tactical. You may find they are closer to WHAT you intend to do, rather than HOW and so can be moved down a level.

Defining WHAT the Organisation needs to do

Once you have defined HOW you will achieve the purpose, consider WHAT needs to be done to achieve that. Again, bringing individually created ideas into the wider team for discussion is the method of creation.

Remembering that we are still high level strategic thinking, consider for each HOW, What needs to be done to reach the Purpose.

There should be a clear and strong linkage between WHAT you do and the reason WHY you are doing them. If not, go back. It is easy to fall into the trap of just documenting what you do today rather than what you need to do.

This WHY, HOW, WHAT structure is crucial as a road map to delivering the Purpose in a way that will create a high productivity, low frustration, collaborative approach that delivers ever increasing value for your customers/user in the least wasteful way. We will discover how that is assured in the continuation of this series