Social Mission Matters: Changing Our Minds About Mission Could Change Everything

Many organizations work hard at making a profit, and then do all kinds of things, completely unrelated to their mission, to make a difference. Why?

A handful of reasons I suppose, like:

Sometimes if people can’t find meaning through their work, they reach out to make a difference with people they’ve met at work. People often get involved in a project that has little to do with the work of the organization itself. They work together, with or without company sanction, to support a cause or community effort outside the business.

Sometimes a company realizes it requires a ‘social license to operate’. They recognize the value of being seen doing good things. It helps maintain a level of social legitimacy in the eyes of community, regulators, customers and employees. Companies do all sorts of things in this vein, including cause marketing, donations, fund awards and agencies, pay for their employees to put in volunteer time and the like.

But none of these things, as great as they are, stem from the specific purpose for which the organization was formed. Yet these things happen anyway because there’s great need calling out, in a variety of ways, for a connection to higher purpose and peak potential. They are resilient.

The enthusiasm people and organizations have for these kinds of activities tips off that critical motivation: We want the work and relationships we engage in to be meaningful.

As organizational leaders, designers, framers, what sense does it make for us to watch that motivation hunt around looking for an outlet that is extra-curricular to the work our organization is doing? Are we making the most of our workplaces to create opportunities for this motivation to manifest itself?

Can we design a higher purpose into our core business that honours that natural motivation and breathes life into the work people do with us for the better part of their waking hours? Are we defining our mission in a way that inadvertently and unnecessarily blocks the flow of that life-giving energy?

I think we too often do. I also think it wouldn’t be too hard to change.

I’ve heard it said that the most inexpensive and most powerful thing in the world to change is your mind. So what if we changed our minds about mission?

How hard would it be, really, to recast our mission statements in social terms? How hard would it be to see the good our organizations already or could do, in social terms, and put it right up there, at the top of the thought hierarchy in our organizations, in our mission statements?

To do so would be to define our organization as a Social Mission organization. My guess is that just about every one of us could do it.

Just for fun, a couple of examples:

A film studio could move from a mission like, “To have the grossest box office receipts of any film company in North America” to “To make movies that inspire people to get involved in the new millennium opportunities to make a difference.”

An engineering firm could move from, “To be the firm of choice for governments around the world” to “To engineer infrastructures for municipalities anywhere in the world that maximizes the health, safety, and quality of life of their residents.”

By changing the way we view the purpose of our organization and casting that view into a mission stated not in current business terms, but in social terms, we would begin a delightful, motivating and liberating shift in our cultures and results. Business functions are, after all, ready to mature beyond being ends to being means. And the most useful, motivating ends are those defined in social terms. Connecting to a purpose beyond ourselves is the really fun thing, and the same goes for organizations.

Changing our mission statements to overt social purposes begins the process of redesigning why we do business at all. It’s a first step that wouldn’t demand changing much other than the point of view by which we see our work. The next steps will become apparent as this higher purpose takes hold in the attitudes and actions of employees, customers and community members.

Why we do business at all is the biggest social, business and design opportunity going.

Please share your thoughts by writing to peter@axiomnews.ca. I’ll share your comments with our newsroom and work them into future entries.

P.S. An axiom I’ve come to accept: An organization has only two legitimate purposes: To fill a human need in society, and to provide opportunities for people to do meaningful work. It would seem to me that if the first is well defined, the second will follow naturally and in due course.