Why Finding Your Purpose Is Not Enough

The Awaken phase is signalled by something bringing purpose into consciousness — for an individual or for an organisation. It can arrive quietly or with force.

For individuals, the trigger might be as simple as a deep conversation or an article like this one. For others, it stems from a seismic life change: a divorce, the death of a loved one, a health challenge, a child asking a question you cannot answer. Some arrive at purpose from a place of absence — when a lack of deep fulfilment has been gnawing away for years, or when an existential question finally forces itself to the surface.

In an organisational context, purpose awakens from curiosity — when a leader decides to lean more profoundly into why their organisation truly exists. It can also originate from disruption, when existing strategies stop bearing fruit, or from transformation, when survival requires a different kind of reason to be.

The AI transition is producing a new and urgent version of this awakening. Leaders who built careers on knowing things — on expertise, on analysis, on the ability to synthesise information faster than others — are discovering that this advantage is eroding rapidly. AI is better at knowing. The question of what to do with what is known remains stubbornly human. Many leaders are encountering this as a crisis. We believe it is an invitation.

It is one thing to have purpose brought into consciousness. The Act phase is about taking deliberate and disciplined action in response. In our experience, this is where the primary competitive advantage of being purpose-led originates — because most people and organisations stop before they get here.

We recently met a very seasoned executive on a path to becoming CEO of a global financial services company. Every move he had made over his career was carefully orchestrated toward this goal. We met at a retreat, and on the return journey had a five-hour conversation exploring what brought him happiness and fulfilment. It became apparent he was incredibly competent at his job — but it did not provide him a deep sense of joy.

There was no doubt this was his awakening moment. But what he did next signals this phase: action. Importantly, there was no rash reaction. He did not quit his job the next day. Rather, there was an acknowledgement that deep introspective work was required. With typical executive rigour, he spent the following months building an inventory of his life by reflecting on three questions:

• What were the key influential moments in my life — highs and lows — that have shaped me into the person I am today?
• What were the moments, from childhood to now, that have brought me the most joy?
• How do I want to be remembered?

As a result of this work, he mapped out a pathway to gain expertise in areas more closely aligned to his purpose — without abandoning the professional credibility he had spent decades building. The key was disciplined action grounded in honest reflection.

In an organisational setting, we were once invited by a global resources company to review its stated purpose: "to create long-term shareholder value." Its board had read about the importance of purpose and wanted a sense check. As we talked it through, the executives came to realise this was not a purpose — it was an outcome. Over the following eighteen months, they acted: delving into the organisation's history to understand why it truly needed to exist. That distinction — between a reason to be and a result of being — is one that many organisations still have not made.

When we start working with new leaders, we begin by asking them to share their purpose. This immediately reveals whether the inner work has been done. One of two responses follows: they either articulate their purpose crisply and with genuine conviction, or they launch into a vague and long-winded monologue.

Could you imagine an executive saying to their board, "our strategy is kind of like this"? The Articulate phase demands the same precision and conviction that leaders would bring to any other strategic question.

Across hundreds of client engagements, we have found a compelling correlation between the success of organisational purpose and leadership teams that have done the personal work first. Grounded in a sense of conviction about the legacy they want to leave, these leaders have the energy and authenticity to fuel purpose activation from the top down. Those who have not done the personal work tend to produce purpose statements that sound good on the website and mean nothing in the meeting room.

There is a physiology to articulating purpose. It lights us up. And once leaders feel that energy themselves, it becomes far easier to find the words that capture their organisation's reason to be. A sense of clarity — sometimes even physical excitement — is a reliable signal that you are on track.

On a recent retreat, a poem provoked a group of executives into setting aside their organisational roles and asking what truly brought them joy and how they wanted to serve others. Before leaving, they were each asked to draft an initial articulation of their personal purpose — treating it as a hypothesis to be tested against real experience until it distilled to its essence.

For many, the process winds down once articulation is complete. A purpose statement is published, a launch event is held, and everyone returns to business as usual. This is the most common and most costly failure point in the entire lifecycle.

Our fieldwork has long suggested that most organisations stall here — and the data across the broader market confirms it. Only one in three Fortune 500 companies has a genuine corporate purpose statement. Even among the world's most purpose-committed organisations, a third have no metrics in place to measure whether purpose is shaping their actual decisions and resource allocation.

The Align phase is where the real work begins. Armed with a road-tested purpose, it is about aligning choices, decisions and resources in active support of it — and, equally importantly, about knowing what to stop.

One of our clients, a government organisation, decided at this phase to conduct a full inventory of all inflight projects. Leaders mapped them into three categories: complete alignment with purpose, partial alignment, and questionable or no alignment. After extensive dialogue, they wound down 30% of inflight projects over the following twelve months. Not only did this demonstrate the executive team's commitment to purpose — it gave the organisation the breathing space to focus on work that would genuinely move it forward.

This is where the "a-ha" moment most often arrives. Leaders tell us that once they can articulate their purpose and begin aligning to it, new opportunities emerge and reveal themselves. This is not coincidence. It is because they have reshaped how they approach their role, sharpened their listening and become attuned to where they can truly be of service.

In the age of AI, the Align phase takes on additional urgency. AI will surface more options, generate more strategies and identify more opportunities than any leadership team can pursue. Without purpose as an active filter, organisations risk accelerating in multiple directions simultaneously — impressive in motion, incoherent in effect.

In 1961, John F. Kennedy committed the United States to landing a man on the moon before the decade was out. He did not know how it would be done. The path was entirely unclear. But the declaration itself was the point — it crystallised purpose into a galvanising, audacious, non-negotiable goal.

This is the essence of the Amplify phase: a deliberate shift from direction as identity to direction as ambition. It is about setting explicit, long-range goals — goals ambitious enough to require the entire organisation to grow into them, goals that face outward toward the world rather than inward toward the balance sheet. These are not growth targets or profit milestones. Those tell people what the organisation needs. Amplify goals tell people what the organisation is for.

Unilever, under Paul Polman's leadership, publicly paired its purpose — to make sustainable living commonplace — with three impact pillars, each carrying an ambitious goal to achieve by 2020. It gave the company, which had lost its way in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, a new direction. Shareholder returns increased substantially over his decade of leadership. Purpose, in this case, was not a constraint on commercial performance. It was its engine.

Kiwibank, the New Zealand state-owned bank, amplified its purpose around three externally focused pillars: Tamariki (children to be better off), Kiwi (people to be better off) and Aotearoa (New Zealand to be better off). Each pillar carries a clear, time-bound goal. Since unveiling this approach in 2021, its financial performance has improved dramatically. As CEO Steve Jurkovich told us: "We get performance through purpose. Once we worked out what purpose really meant to us and what we truly cared about by talking it through with our team members, it became a win-win — not a trade-off."

The Amplify phase requires conviction and measured courage. These goals are set before the path is clear — they are ambitious precisely because they are outside the range of what feels safe. But they create a profound shift in empowerment across the organisation. Leaders who have been through this phase often note how it fosters a more autonomous, less hierarchical culture. Purpose, at this scale, gives people permission to lead without being told how.

The final phase is the one most organisations never reach, and the one that determines whether everything that came before it was real.

The Assure phase is not an annual review. It is an embedded discipline of honest, ongoing measurement and review that keeps purpose alive rather than allowing it to become a historical artefact. It is the practice of looking in the mirror and letting the facts speak — not the facts you hoped for, but the ones that are actually there.

The Victorian Gambling and Casino Control Commission, an Australian regulator whose purpose is "to ensure integrity, safety and fairness for all," demonstrated this by developing a detailed impact reporting framework to inform its decision-making and annual planning. Former CEO Annette Kimmitt was direct about why radical honesty matters: well-intended activities don't always lead to desired impact. Sometimes unintended consequences arise. By measuring progress objectively, the Commission was able to course-correct along the way — turning the Assure phase into a genuine learning system rather than a compliance exercise.

Kiwibank's annual sustainability report states clearly what progress has been made and what actions will maintain momentum. This is not a public relations document. It is an accountability mechanism — the organisation holding itself to the commitments it made in public, and being willing to say when it has fallen short.

For individuals, the Assure phase means asking whether the decisions you are making in the room are consistent with the purpose you articulated at the retreat. It means noticing the gap between who you intend to be and who you are in practice — and having the courage to close it.

This data is, in part, a measure of Assure failure at scale. When leaders and organisations do not hold themselves genuinely accountable to their stated values and purpose, it shows up in how their people feel. Disengagement is not primarily a management problem. It is a purpose problem — the lived experience of working for an organisation that says one thing and does another.