Mission

The mission has two levels

The first is about the company: what it sets out to do, not this quarter but over years. The second is about the individual: what role they hold inside that project and what they contribute. You work on both, because a company mission nobody can translate into their own daily work stays a sentence on a website. Having a part in the project is half of it; feeling part of it is the other half. The phase is finished when everybody in the room answers the same three questions the same way: what is the team’s mission, what is the mission inside that mission, and what is the mission of the people working alongside you.

Where it breaks

A case we see often. The company decides to expand internationally and announces the objective. On paper it’s clear and nobody objects. Then it turns out one person is afraid of having to learn a new language at forty, another has no intention of relocating, and a third has a problem with frequent travel that they’ve never mentioned to anyone.

None of those three things comes out in a meeting, and all three weigh on the result. Every mission brings doubts and fears with it: better to get them out beforehand than to meet them once the project has started.

The word success

There’s an exercise we do almost every time, and it almost always surprises people. You ask each person what the word success means to them. Some say the work, some say money, some say the balance between the two, some say being recognised by colleagues. They’re all legitimate answers and they’re all different.

The point of the exercise is to notice that until that moment everyone had been using the same word while thinking about different things. It happens with success, it happens with quality, it happens with urgent. When it happens with a word that sits inside the mission, that mission is only written down the same way for everybody, and shared by nobody.

How we work on it

For mission and vision the format we use most often is Movie Making. The reason is practical: shooting a short film forces you to say something large in very few words and in very few minutes. You can’t stay vague inside a shot.

In large companies mission and vision come down from the top, and the people further down the chart receive them pre-packaged, having never had the chance to argue with them. The video reverses the direction: to tell the story the group has to rework them first, and what comes out gets watched together and discussed.

The other instrument is Heroes Day. Everyone chooses a superhero or invents one and builds it around themselves: what powers it has, what it’s for in the team, what it can’t do. Said in the first person, the same thing wouldn’t come out. Said through a character, it almost always does.

It’s there to make explicit a principle that otherwise stays a good intention. A team made of people who resemble each other is poorer than a team made of people who don’t, and the differences usually get felt as friction long before they get felt as a resource.