Goal Core · Purpose · Module
Reason for being
The articulation itself: one sentence saying why the organisation exists, written so that it would still hold if the product changed entirely.
The idea
How it works
A reason for being is not a description of what the company sells. It is the answer to why selling that matters at all, and the test of whether you have reached it is that the answer no longer changes when you ask why again.
The usual failure is stopping too early. “We make accounting software” becomes “we make accounting easier”, which becomes “we give small businesses back the hours they lose to admin” — and only the last of those would survive the company moving into something other than software.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
Start from what you actually do
Write the plainest possible description of the current business. Not aspirational, just accurate.
- 02
Ask why that matters, repeatedly
Each answer becomes the new subject. Keep going until two consecutive answers say the same thing in different words.
- 03
Test it against a change of product
Imagine the current offer discontinued. If the sentence no longer makes sense, it describes a product rather than a purpose.
- 04
Cut it to one sentence
Length is a symptom of unresolved thinking. If it needs two sentences, one of them is a goal.
One level in
The components of reason for being
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
The purpose statement
One sentence, agreed and dated. The single artefact everything else in this module exists to produce.
LearnThe laddering record
The chain of answers that led to it. Worth keeping, because it is the argument for the statement and the fastest way to re-derive it later.
LearnThe refusal test
A short list of things the organisation has declined, or would decline, because of this purpose. If the list is empty, the statement is not yet doing work.
Learn
A purpose statement that everyone agreed to immediately usually means it was too general to disagree with.
The other modules in purpose
Stakeholder rationale
Whom the purpose is for, and what each of them gets from it. Naming them makes the purpose answerable to someone rather than to no one.
LearnAlignment
How the purpose is actually used: which decisions are tested against it, at what points, and by whom. Without a mechanism, alignment is an intention.
LearnIntegrity
The distance between the purpose as stated and the purpose as enacted. Worth measuring deliberately, because the gap is invisible from the inside and obvious from the outside.
LearnCore values
The small set of commitments the organisation will not trade, even when trading them would be profitable — which is the only test that separates a value from a preference.
Learn