A mission becomes necessary on the day procedures stop being enough

This chain works backwards, and that is why implementations step back. To write sensible goals, you need to know what the priority is, and that is what the strategy says. To write a strategy, a diagnosis of the current state isn't enough, because without a long-term direction there is nothing to compare the options against. And the direction is a picture of the world in the future, once we have fulfilled what we have taken to be our purpose. Hence the vision, and behind it the mission. Along the way the episode offers a simplification worth remembering, because companies routinely glue the two concepts into one sentence or multiply visions at every level of the organisation: the mission answers the question of what we do in order to have an impact on something, and the vision is the picture of the world once it has been fulfilled.

The second thing we say in this episode is unusually honest for this topic: not every company needs a mission. A business that is simply meant to make money for its owner can do without one, and there is nothing shameful about that. It becomes indispensable in two situations. The first: we want to build something that will outlast us, something that will remain after the founder. The second is more down to earth: rules, regulations and checklists can no longer cover everything that happens in the organisation, so people have to choose on their own. The trigger is neither the size nor the age of the company. It is the moment when two or more people face a difficult choice and need something bigger to hold that choice up against.

That is why the test of a mission is not how it sounds. In the episode we read out the mission of one of the Polish state-owned companies: striving for the position of regional leader and long-term growth in value for shareholders by offering customers products and services of the highest quality. The sentence is correct, and not a single decision can rest on it. The tests we propose instead of reading are two, and both are done on people, not on the text. Externally: you tell your mission to clients, partners and people close to you, and watch the reaction, because no reaction is information too. Internally: you ask your people how they understand it, and treat the differences in their answers as the result of an audit. I write about this carefully, because this is the part of the work where it is easiest to end up with a nice sentence that has nothing behind it, including for us. The question about the purpose of your own organisation is asked many times, not once at a workshop: in the episode someone says that before the answer came that surprised anyone, they had to ask themselves the question a hundred times. On top of that comes a mechanism that is easy to forget after a successful workshop. Anything agreed has to be repeated at least seven times, and from different sources, before anyone believes it, so a mission without repetition, and without showing how it plays out in a specific decision, remains a poster on the wall.