85 - Social Architecture - Mission

The Mission component of Social Architecture

I’m writing about social architecture: the why, the components and the actions. The first component is Mission. Mission is the cause. The thing(s) in this world that should be better than they are today. The change that you as business and team are working to bring about.

Mission makes two contributions to the why of social architecutre. The first is motivation. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, the person “who has a why to live for, can bear almost any how”. A sense of worthy mission pushes people forwards. The second is minimising distraction. Politics thrives in darkness that can be extinguished by mission’s light. Evidence the challenge of finding an organisation with a keen, embedded, aligned sense of mission, which is also blighted by politics.

Three pointers on mission:

• To be effective in the above ways, it needs to be worthy. Drug dealers have missions;

• It’s easy to succumb to the other extreme. To think that worthy means blockbuster lofty. At Mayday, our mission is to mend month end, automating accounting processes. By doing so, to help finance teams be more efficient. To get management information out earlier. To save them from boring work they hate. To enable them to do more value adding work they enjoy. To progress faster in their careers. We are not automating world peace. And we don’t need to be in order to have a worthy mission. Worthy means virtuous positive impact on peoples’ lives;

• People connect with missions in their own individual ways, which is great. But everyone needs to understand the same mission. It needs to be clear and tangible. Here’s looking at you WeWork and elevating the world’s consciousness.