What is Purpose Design?

Purpose design is a business design process that addresses the question "What problem does your business exist to solve?". Behind the answer

to this question sits another that also needs to be addressed and that is "What is your testable hypothesis regarding your ability to solve this problem better than anyone else in the market?"

Purpose design is usually undertaken by executive management teams, and the more enlightened of these also include others from across the organisation with a variety of experience and perspectives.

There is a tendency amongst executive managers to offer grandiose statements about purpose, despite the actual business purpose occasionally being quite banal (e.g., How to generate maximum ROI for owners and investors). It therefore helps to have a bit of honesty in the room. However, surfacing the actual less-than-earth-shattering purpose rather than continuing with the inevitably overheated vision and mission statements (e.g., "transforming the global market by selling our awesome product") can be a moment of realisation and creative inspiration that demands a better answer - and sometimes an existential transformation of a business.

Where purpose connects to business model is to then ask the second question - what is the testable hypothesis as to why your business in particular is able to fulfill its purpose? What is it about your business that means that it is better placed than any other to solve the purpose problem? This question is usually considered from the perspectives of customer, employee, business partners and the wider eco-system in which the business is located and operates. Do you have a unique relationship with your customers or a genuinely unique product? Are your people uniquely skilled and talented? Do you have a unique network of partnering businesses and suppliers? or can you point to genuinely unique benefits to the planet and society? If the answer is 'no' to every one of these questions then it might be time to ask the ultimate existential question.

The last element of purpose design is to consider what the stated purpose and unique business model features mean for brand, values and strategic goals. Brand needs be the embodiment your unique customer relationship. Values need to describe how you intend to operate in the broader sense. Values describe what you stand for and clearly need to reflect and align with your purpose. Designing your strategic goals is the opportunity to capture your ambition - now that you have clarity about your purpose... and that is a whole separate topic for another day.

If you find any of these ideas interesting then I'd invite you to explore them further in the freely book 'This is Business Design' available to download on this website.