The Purpose Shortlist

Where your organization actually stands, and the two or three things to do about it

Most leaders who want to do something with Purpose and believe it will help their company are looking at ten possible moves and cannot tell which ones matter. 

Change the hiring process? Rework the strategic plan? Fix how you talk about yourselves? Bring the board along? 

Every one of them sounds worth doing, so either nothing happens or effort gets spread thin across all ten and none of them land.

This gives you a short list instead of a long one.

What happens

We talk to whoever can speak to these best, no more than 30 minutes per topic, from each of seven areas of your organization: business model, governance and leadership, people and culture, operations, customer experience and marketing, business ecosystem, and monitoring and reporting.

Seven areas matters, because purpose usually breaks down at the seams between functions rather than inside any one of them. Talking to the people who know each area best, using a tested assessment tool, surfaces the places where two parts of the organization are working from different assumptions and nobody has noticed.

We write the report and bring it back to your leadership team for thirty minutes. You tell us where we have read it right and where we have read it wrong, and that conversation shapes the final version.

You end up with a written report covering where the organization sits in each of the seven areas, and a shortlist of two or three top priorities to focus on that will shift the business, in order, with the reasoning attached.

What it is not

It is not a verdict handed down from outside. The recommendations come out of what your own people told us, and you will recognize most of it when you read it. What you will not have had before is all seven views in one place, in priority order.

Why it is worth $950

Because the alternative is guessing, and guessing is more expensive than it looks. A year spent on the wrong three initiatives costs you the year, the internal goodwill you spent getting people to participate, and the credibility you need for the next attempt.

A few hours of your team’s time and a fixed fee, and you come out knowing what to do next and why.

Who it suits

Organizations that already have a purpose statement and are not sure it is doing anything. 

Organizations partway through this work and stalled. 

Leadership teams that disagree about where to focus and would like an outside read.

What happens after

Most people who do this want help with at least one of the priorities on their shortlist. If that is you, here is how we work.

We start where you are. That might be Articulate, if the statement about what your organization is for is not settled yet. It might be Integrate, if the statement exists and is not built into your plan, your operations or how decisions get made. It might be Activate, if it is built in and now needs to actually drive what you do next.

We do not go back and redo work you have already done. The shortlist tells us which of the three you are in, and we start there.

If none of the next moves need us, the report says so and you take it from here. That is a fine outcome.

How to book

I can start three of these before October 31, 2026. Bookings after that start in November.

To book, email me at maryellen@purposepathways.ca  and I'll send you an invoice. Once that's done, we'll agree when we begin and who I should speak to, and I'll get going right away.