How to Activate Purpose-Led Strategy in your Organisation
About the Authors:
Adithi Pandit
Partner - Strategy & Business Design at Deloitte
Adithi leads Deloitte’s strategy and business design practice and social innovation and impact services in New Zealand. Her focus areas are operating model change, transformation of social services and human centred design.
Grace Brebner
Consultant - Strategy & Business Design at Deloitte
Grace is a social impact and strategy consultant, passionate about improving social welfare, inclusion and equality in Aotearoa through effective and sustainable organisational strategy and business design.
Deploying siloed tactics does not equate to purpose-driven strategy. This is as true in purpose-driven strategy as any other. While there is potential to deliver social impact this way, it can slip easily into “special projects” that organisations do on the side and the public is savvy in recognising authenticity.
To ensure genuine – and sustained - impact, purpose must be seen as a long-term commitment that is well-defined and measurable, and embedded into an organisation’s operating model, culture, values, brand, products and stakeholder engagement. This means that a company’s purpose-driven strategy and corporate strategy should be one and the same. A number of key learnings illuminate how the most successful, high impact purpose-driven organisations achieved this:
1. Understand what value means to those you want to provide value to
Value means different things to different people. To provide maximum impact, organisations need to understand what that means from the perspectives of those they’re built to serve. We advocate working collaboratively with key stakeholders and partners throughout the design and implementation of strategy to integrate stakeholder voices and ensure the business stays relevant and fit for purpose. While this isn’t easy - it requires higher up-front costs and can mean grappling with complex and contradictory perspectives on what value means - it is essential to truly unlock business potential.
2. Choose where you can make an impact
Your organisation is unique; it brings capabilities and opportunities that others don’t. Your purpose-driven strategy should look to understand what you bring – and what you need to build – to have the impact that you seek. This might be your relationship with your customers, your core skills and capabilities, or your role in the sector. Challenge yourselves: is this our biggest purpose bang for buck? Are we best placed to play here?
3. Clearly articulate your strategy
Leading purpose-driven organisations clearly articulate these choices. This goes beyond just clarity of mission – it also means being clear on who exactly they want to affect, when and at what stages, what outcomes they want to achieve and how they’ll measure them. They tell a coherent purpose story which emphasises their differentiated holistic value proposition and utilises data and evidence to invest strategically where they can make the most impact.
4. Measure the social impact that you’re making
To ensure consistency with and accountability to their purpose, organisations must embed purpose metrics and indicators into their processes, ensuring that both the good and the bad outcomes are tracked, assessed and communicated to stakeholders. This brings data to the debate, illuminating opportunities to accelerate positive impact and mitigate negative impact, and guides future decisions around where to allocate resources. Measurement should be ongoing and utilise both quantitative and qualitative measures to ensure stakeholder perspectives are incorporated.
5. Embed a practice of continuous improvement
High impact, purpose-led organisations utilise information to understand and improve performance and efficiency, learn new and better ways to achieve their purpose and influence future direction and approach. This is a continuous process that involves reviewing the collection of information to ensure it is sufficiently comprehensive, as well as the results themselves. In practice, this means embedding robust internal and external feedback loops for stakeholders and staff, understanding the metrics for continuous improvement, and coaching to embed a culture of continuous improvement.
Partner, Strategy & Business Design
Consultant | Consulting - Strategy & Business Design
Deloitte New Zealand
04 470 3500
Related Articles
Deploying siloed tactics does not equate to purpose-driven strategy. This is as true in purpose-driven strategy as any other. While there is potential to deliver social impact this way, it can slip easily into “special projects” that organisations do on the side and the public is savvy in recognising authenticity.