Designers deserve purpose
Designing for money alone is meaningless and boring. What designers want is to make a positive impact on the human experience, but to achieve that, they need a purpose they can really get behind.
What is purpose?
Humans are funny creatures. We have developed in such a strange and complex way, all in the name of survival, yet with the tools we learned to survive, we began to develop a range of experiential sensations. One of these tools, storytelling, enabled us to make sense of what it was we were experiencing. It enabled us to join the dots of who we are within our world. This formation of identity paved the path for purpose, the thing that gives us an intrinsic sense of reason. It is the motivation that keeps us going. It’s like some kind of psychological fuel that steers every action and every behaviour. Unlike goals, it cannot be achieved. It is more like a lens, or a filter that we apply to everything we do. It is like our internal compass. It is never-ending and ever-present. It is the single reason why we do what we do.
But purpose is not given, it must be sought.
Everyone experiences purpose differently and could be motivated by many different purposes. Not only this, but purpose is even more powerful when multiple people rally behind them. A successful and talented leader will use purpose as their central pillar to winning the hearts and minds of those they are leading. But leaders who don’t use it, well… they aren’t really leaders are they, instead perhaps they are merely managers.
The role of purpose within organisations
Many organisations use terms like ‘mission statement’, ‘vision’, and ‘strategy’. These words have been brewed in as standard operating process. Unfortunately, many companies set these statements without the full and collective understanding of how they work. This is because before you can set any of these things, you need a clearly defined and collectively agreed purpose. This should be the cornerstone upon which you build your house.
A mission is not a purpose
The word ‘mission’ is derived from the Latin word mittere, meaning to send, and was primarily a religious term of specifically sending the holy spirit into the world. If you think for example of missionaries, you will see what I mean. They believe they were sent into the world on a ‘mission’ to bring god to the ‘savage’ populations of the world. Coming from New Zealand, I understand the brutality and long-lasting pain that this dominating and colonialist mindset has brought.
To have a mission implies that you have been sent by a higher presence to contort the world into your vision. This thinking is based upon your prejudice that you already know what the world needs and you will do anything in your power to make it happen. Like with any conquest, there is an end goal in sight. This is perhaps your vision, but at some point, you know your mission is done, and it is time to move on to the next thing.
Although there are many similarities between mission and purpose, they are however distinct.
Purpose is something intrinsic to yourself, no one has given it to you and it is not based upon any external constructs. Everyone has a purpose, it is that invisible force within you that guides you. The problem is that not everyone knows what theirs is or they are not given the room to live it. Of course, we are still products of our environments, so we are always linked to the external, however, your purpose is yours to own.
Companies aren’t their owners
A company should not be seen as an entity separate from the people who keep it in existence, its employees. Under the capitalist model, it is investors that ‘own’ companies (apart from worker-owned co-operatives). This is simply the way we have let things happen, even though we are convinced that the investors own the company, all they really own is the rights to the economic output, and the term ’ownership’ is nothing more than a promise of violence to protect it. They might own the company, but they are not the company, and therefore do not decide what the company's soul is. With a human-centric mindset, it is the people that are the company. In my mind, a company is simply a group of people who are doing things, bound with a common purpose. Whatever economic or legal frameworks are thrown upon it does not change that fact. The company is the people.
The confirmation bias trap
As a youth, I was one of those annoying, anti-consumerist ideologists that was convinced that the banks were the ultimate evil. Of course, despite my naivety, in essence, there was some truth to the feeling, but as youth tend to do, I detested them.
Moving on a few years, of course, I got a job as a UX designer at the most conservative bank in Sweden. Despite the bank’s clear goal of being a bit more profitable than the average of the other large banks, I still managed to convince myself that I was doing something good, something noble. I told myself pragmatically that despite banks being the key piece that hold billions of people into economic servitude, these people have to be able to bank in order to participate in society. I told myself that even if I could help people to not have the frustrating experiences that I had had with various banks and their machine-like bureaucracy, then I would be making the world a better place.
Unfortunately, just convincing myself of this did not make it true. Despite trying to champion my own values, they drowned silent in a sea of financial figures. This is because this particular organisation was profit-driven, not purpose driven. If only the leadership would’ve stopped polishing the boots of their investors and started to listen to their employees and their customers. If only.
This is why I left. The thin veil of hope had evaporated and my bubble had popped. I could not be part of an organisation that did not share my values and was not committed to making the world a better place. Their loss. This simply goes to show that we have the vulnerability as humans, to convince ourselves of whatever it is we want to think is true. Next time your company talks about goals or OKRs, ask yourself, does this align with your values? Is this something that you can passionately get behind? Or is your company simply a machine for already rich people to get even richer?
Ask yourself what you think you deserve.
Alignment is key
For a company to be effective in its progress, the people need to be aligned. As we are all probably aware, people tend not to agree on everything. It is almost impossible to force people into alignment. Somehow I fooled myself into thinking that working for a bank would make the world a better place, so I left. At this particular organisation, the lack of purpose other than making already wealthy people even wealthier trickled down into every interaction between people of different skill sets. This was most noticeable when interacting with the security department. They saw their purpose as protecting the bank from any means of exploitation possible. Although this seems reasonable, it was in fact in direct conflict with the company's main goal of making more money, as it essentially ruled out the use of any technology that was less than 20 years old, including anything on the cloud. As you can imagine, this made any progress nearly impossible. Having departments working against each other does not work very effectively. They implement this style with the hope that the forces will balance each other out, but it just creates waste. Another example of this is the ‘business — user — engineering’ triumvirate. This is when designers fight for the user at the expense of business value or technical feasibility, or more common when business value trumps the rest. We shouldn’t have to work against each other to fight for our area of responsibility, we should all be able to work together with our respective domains with one common purpose.
When aligning on your company's purpose, this must be genuine and come from the heart of your employees. If you find that you have conflicting purposes, then you need to make the tough decision, which will it be? By focusing on your purpose, you will help attract and retain valuable, like-valued people. It will also act as a filter, keeping value detractors away.
Not to be confused with social enterprise
The term ‘ purpose-driven company’ is used to define what I would call a social enterprise. However, what I refer to as a company’s purpose is something more general. I mean here that every company has the opportunity to have a purpose, not just social enterprises.
A social enterprise is a company which is committed to having a positive social impact whilst also being profitable (as opposed to a charity). Having been part of the social enterprise network Enspiral early on in my career, I have to say that they inspired me deeply as to using business as a positive force in the world. Previous to this, I have to say, I was extremely disenfranchised by the way the world was run, where the sole aim was to get rich and anything that wasn't for profit had to be picked up by charities and volunteers. There is a place for social enterprises in the economy at the moment, but I believe that they only exist as a solution to a symptom and they don’t necessarily address the root cause. I think that if every company had a human centric purpose that was beyond just making money then it wouldn’t be as important to niche as a social enterprise.
A Human-centric purpose
We tend to think so much in terms of technology, processes, and efficiency that we end up optimising the things we do for the benefit of non-human entities. A purpose should specifically be aimed at helping humans. If you want to make money, where does that money come from? Your customers, who are people. Even in B2B, as I said earlier, businesses are just groups of people. If you focus on helping people, then money will find you.
A non-human-centric purpose would be: To make more profit that the average of our benchmarked competitors.
A human-centric purpose for a bank might be: To help people reach their financial goals.
Summary
Making a meaningful impact on the world seems like an unobtainable luxury for many. You not only have to follow the directions that your managers set out for you, but you also have to pay your bills and ensure a good life for those who are dependent on you. Even if you don’t want to take the risk of quitting your corporation and finding something more meaningful, you still have the power to make change at your company. Because after all, it’s not made by its owners, it’s made by you.
