Organizations Beyond Purpose

Organizations deserve dignity as collective beings

In my recent article, “Burned out on goodness,” I mentioned that I no longer believe in organizational purposes, at least not in the way they are often used.

I even find that our purpose obsession is a hefty remnant of our mental colonization. How so?

The imperative to be useful

Many readers will know this uncomfortable feeling of being asked, “So, what do you do?” Typically, that’s a question asking for our job – how we are productive members of the economy. Our jobs currently define how we fit into society. And even if outside of paid work, we describe our purpose as if it were a job, like “I’m a full-time dad.”

Because in this culture of having to produce to be worthy, of commodification and performative identity, everything we do has to be useful. And way too many of us attach our sense of self-worth and dignity to our usefulness.

But we know that a person is valuable beyond their usefulness. For example, we love a child or friend not for their usefulness but for who they are. If we love them for what we can get from them, that’s messed up. (For example, the idea of someone having children just so the parents have a sense of purpose in their own lives, hopefully makes everyone cringe – and it’s likely going to turn ugly.)

Let’s turn our attention to organizations. In organizations, just like in the example of the child-turned-parental-purpose example, having a narrow obsession with purpose is dangerously narrow. That’s most obvious if the purpose is making a profit, of course, but purpose-washing (selective purpose-posturing) is how organizations stay on-brand … while being off-track as a whole. And I’m not even assuming malicious intent (or only a little) – cherry-picking the best metrics and ignoring others is behavior that the incentive landscape of glorifying purpose will simply produce.

Nonprofits, for example, have to play the game of purpose and value signaling as well. That’s why I want to throw my computer out the window whenever I need to fill out a grant application, telling a glossy story of wonderful and measurable impact (without rocking the boat too much). I hate how the system sucks integrity out of me. I’d rather tell the whole story, as it is. Life is too short to lie about who we are.

Why do organizations exist?

So, what is the “whole story” of an organization? Why do we form organizations if not to be useful? That’s where a little nuance comes in. I’m not saying that organizations can’t be useful or can’t follow a purpose. That would be like saying humans shouldn’t be useful.

An organization’s primary reason for existing is simple: because it can. Humans are social creatures, and we cluster together because that’s how we live as humans. When people talk about purposes, it sometimes seems to me like they’re trying to prove that organizations are useful, because just the desire of clustering together seems too touchy-feely to admit. We can’t just meet. We have to be useful while doing it.

Of course we want companionship or contribution. But we want so much more. It’s also livelihood. And connection. Exploration, learning. Stimulation. And dignity. In fact, it’s all the reasons. Just like a human exists to express all their needs, we exist in our collective version to express all our needs. We are humans because we’re together.

So collectives exist not for one purpose but for all the purposes.

And if you think about it, why would it be anything but that? Why would the collective version of humans be any different from the individual version? Why would I regularly hang out with other people merely to meet one particular need, one purpose, stated on the company’s website. Isn’t that a weird thing to think?

Marshall Rosenberg, who put together Nonviolent Communication, compiled a list of universal needs. He subtitled his book The Language of Life. Why is it the language of life? Because Life encompasses all needs. Life is the highest purpose, maybe the one and only purpose, for everything narrower than Life will leave crucial things out and therefore be too narrow.

Life being life

People cluster in organizations for the same reasons our cells cluster together to form our bodies: because Life always finds another way to combine, recombine, differentiate, cooperate, and find new, creative ways to express variety. Early life forms just happened to form, and all of a sudden, new constellations began to stick around because new options had arisen. New options to be alive, shape life, play, celebrate aliveness.

And organizations – sustainable collectives of people, things, and processes that can keep themselves alive – can do more things than one person alone. So collectives unlock a whole new way to play the game of Life.

With that, maybe collectives are just life being life, and we’re invited to join.

Forget purpose and business and virtue-signaling for a moment, and open yourself up to that thought: maybe structured clusters of people are just another way of life celebrating life. And you get to be a part of that. Isn’t that amazing?

To do that, the organization needs to leave its founder’s/CEO’s/ED’s lap and enter the stage of life. The collective needs to keep itself alive and steer its attention and activity; it requires proper governance to have full agency (as spelled out in my book Collective Power). Once it has that, it can do almost anything, just like a newborn can grow up to be a painter or an Olympic swimmer.

Choosing where we put our energy

Of course, every creature comes with its own conditions and contexts, so maybe not every body will be an Olympic swimmer. In the same way, not every organization has the preconditions to be a farming operation or a bank. Within its context, there are opportunities and choices.

And that’s the point here:

• Primarily, an organization is a collective creature that has agency over what it does.
• Secondarily, it chooses to enact a purpose for a while. (For example, being a farm.)

If it chooses to be a farm for a while, it will set its operations and assets accordingly. It will choose to pay attention to the weather patterns and seed prices, and it will hire people who know (or want to learn) about farming. It’s the same with a person who sets their mind to winning Olympic gold. They will do a million little things that set them on that track; it will even change their body.

And each of those activities is a choice and a tradeoff. It’s unlikely you’ll have the capacity to write 3 books, start a family, and be on the Olympic team. It’s the same for organizations – we gotta choose. And what we do shapes the collective body, be it in training muscles or in shaping personnel or processes. To adapt, organizations will always specialize and shape-shift so they can make better use of resources. We can’t all do everything so we use our context and conditions, and shape them to find a way to fit into the world.

Purpose >> agency and aliveness

Purpose then is the pale label we give to the outcome of an incredibly complex set of conditions and ongoing choices, like our collective habits, knowledge, skills, memories, relationships. A purpose statement cannot even begin to reflect that complexity. Our whole being and doing is shaped in relationship to the world and our longing in it.

To say that an organization is defined by its purpose is simply a lie. There are two ways in which it’s wrong:

• We don’t do all the things suggested by a purpose statement. It’s impossible to carry out all actions that would be necessary to carry out the purpose. For example, if a university’s purpose is “educating global citizens”. If taken seriously, this would include fostering cross-cultural humility, global ethics, language diversity, and deep historical context. But in practice, it’s a study abroad program in Western Europe, a few global electives, and a diversity statement. Sure, the purpose statement gives you the why and a broader context, but it is incorrect to say that the organization is defined by its purpose. It’s not. It chooses subsets of what it says. Why this subset and not another? There’s something disingenuous here.
• Not all we do is covered by the purpose statement. Let’s admit it. It’s common that an organization chooses to engage in a project even if it doesn’t 100% fit the agreed purpose, just because it’s a good opportunity in other ways, for money, or new ideas. Not doing so would be unwise. They have agency beyond the chosen purpose.

Instead of purpose, I’m much more interested in an organization’s agency to make its choices than its current purpose statement. The capacity to make those choices is like a meta-skill to having a purpose. It’s our capacity to choose wisely, based on the context.

Being honest about impact

Gandhi said, when asked for his message: “My life is my message.” I want the same approach for organizations: fewer glossy words. And being measured by what we do. And that means all of it.

On that note, there is a common distinction of intention vs. impact. Intention is what you intend to do, and impact is the real-life consequences that occur. The distinction is often pointed out when people say things like “Oh, but I didn’t mean to hurt you,” instead of acknowledging that there was hurt, intended or not.

What I’m talking about is completely parallel: purpose statements (expressed or not) are intentions. But I want to talk about what actually happens in the world, not the shiny story in your head that likely just tells you you’re the good person in it all. Stop trying to be the good person and start looking with full honesty at what is happening in the world. We can’t afford any more narcissistic do-gooders. We’ve heard enough good intentions. Honestly, the more an organization talks about its purpose, the more skeptical I get, especially when the story sounds super aligned.

I think that a system based on purpose will just rehash that bias towards glossy words, not honest assessment of context and action.

Purposes are a way to participate in life

Groups without a shared activity often have a hard time sticking together, which may have led to the misconception that it is purposes that make an organization. For example, if a deep retreat ended and everyone wants to keep the group meeting – an effort that often fades after the first reunion. We’ve become a collective being at the retreat and have a hard time letting it die as we go back into our daily contexts.

Maybe the social glue is enough to keep us together. But it’s much easier to be and remain a collective when there’s something we do together. That’s not because of the purpose but because doing something together regularly weaves the threads of our lives together – we get to know each other, we arrange some of our lives around the shared activity, and we build shared history and context. We weave together, among individuals, and the group with the world. And the weaving shapes us, strengthens parts, and loosens others.

Bees pollinate. That’s not their reason for existing; their dignity is not conditional on pollinating to earn the right to be alive. (It wouldn’t be ok to kill a bee that isn’t pollinating.) But life has the habit of weaving things together, because life seeks life, and that’s why the behavior the bee engages in as part of its life also fits into the lives of other beings, like flowers. Over millions of years, we have woven ourselves into what we call complex ecosystems. With that, weaving and participating in life might be the point of life. Not any particular activity, but whatever is ours to do at a given moment.

That’s why choosing a purpose isn’t at odds with life, quite the opposite. Providing a service or resource (aka product) for others is a way to be part of life, and therefore inherently meaningful. As we swim in the flow of life with others, we notice gaps and blockages, and, if we care enough and the conditions are right, begin to add or restore flow. For example, a teacher might develop custom visual aids to help their neurodivergent students grasp abstract concepts. Then other teachers start borrowing those visual aids. Eventually, the materials are formalized into a toolkit or training, not because the teacher set out to “scale” anything or had the purpose to, but because the materials were meaningful in their context and weaving wanted to happen.

The teacher may choose to form a startup, or may not. They might give away materials for free, or not. Any living thing, including free organizations with agency, can choose how – given its context – they want to be woven into the web of life. Each of those choices comes with consequences, of course, as each choice has the potential to change the context for future choices.

This is not about seeking niches to profit off (or creating a demand to then fill it for profit). A life-aligned way of organizations stumbles across gaps in living life and may choose to fill those gaps because that gap matters to the collective, and because it can. Any choice we make can enact our longing to participate in life.

Maybe an organization is formed solely to fill a particular niche and never does anything else, just like a highly specialized species. And there’s nothing wrong with that as long as this organization chooses to be and remain that. Even transactional interactions are fine as long as they happen in a way that acknowledges the full humanity and collective aliveness of everyone involved and affected.

Purpose statements are tools

A purpose statement might reflect that for a while. The full purpose of an organization at any given moment lives in the relationships, the care, the habits, expertise, histories, and longings. A purpose statement can only point to the fully lived, multi-dimensional version of how we fit into the web of life – because words can only ever point to things, never be the thing. It’s the difference between map and territory.

As long as we never forget that purpose statements are just a label and not the real thing, purpose statements are useful, just like job descriptions or promises are useful. Talking or thinking about purpose can help us get clear about what our specific context is that unlocks or constrains choices. Purpose statements are agreements we make together so we can cooperate or align better as we steward a certain aspect of our activities with more attention. They’re tools that we choose to enact our agency as a collective.

Organizations as manifestations of life are another doorway into the principles of Life, just like rocks, flowers, music, or the wind.

Maybe that’s what organizations are asking of us now: not to be seen merely as tools for our ambitions but as living systems with agency, and dignity, and as participants in life, longing to weave. We need to release them from our misconceptions, our obsession of control, and from the distortions of profit, purpose, and performance.

Only then can we meet them as they are: fellow expressions of Life.