Why Every Decision Starts with Purpose

Purpose is the enduring function or reason for existence that lets an organisation distinguish aligned choices from merely convenient ones.

The step everyone skips

In Chapter 4 of Deciding, Roger Estall and I titled the section "It’s the Purpose, Stupid!" We chose that title because the number of organisations that skip this step is staggering. They jump straight to debating options without ever articulating what they are trying to achieve. The Universal Decision-Making Method begins with Purpose for a reason: without it, every option looks roughly equivalent because there is no basis for comparison.

I have lost count of the number of boards I have asked to state their organisation’s Purpose in a single sentence. The exercise almost always reveals the same thing: the people responsible for the most consequential decisions do not agree on what those decisions are meant to serve. Every person in the room imports their own understanding, and each assumes the others share it. Decisions are then made, implemented, and monitored against something that was never articulated. When the outcome disappoints, nobody can explain why, because nobody recorded what the decision was meant to achieve.

Purpose is not a mission statement

Most organisations have a mission statement. Few have a Purpose their people can actually use. The difference is functional. A mission statement is corporate communication. What Roger and I meant in Deciding is something concrete: the reason the organisation exists, stated plainly enough that a person can test every tentative decision against it.

The hospital that closes its mission statement with “delivering excellent patient care” has said nothing that helps a ward manager decide whether to accept a budget cut. A properly stated Purpose tells the ward manager what the hospital is actually trying to achieve. That specificity is what makes it testable. A decision either advances it or it does not.

The Boeing 737 MAX is instructive. The decisions that led to the crisis were not made by people who lacked a risk register or a risk committee. They were made by people whose decision-making had drifted from the organisation’s core reason for existing. No amount of risk management apparatus would have caught that drift, because the apparatus does not ask the right question. The right question is: does this decision serve the stated Purpose?

How it changes the quality of decisions

When it is clear and shared, every subsequent step of the method sharpens. The tentative decision can be tested against it. The assumptions can be classified by their influence on it. The monitoring plan can be designed to watch whether the decision is still serving it. Remove it and all of that machinery spins without traction.

A mining company I worked with in Western Australia had spent three years debating whether to expand into a new deposit. The feasibility studies were thorough. The financial models were detailed. But nobody had connected the expansion decision to the company’s stated reason for operating: to extract and process ore profitably within the regulatory and social constraints of its host communities. Once that connection was made explicit, two Critical assumptions surfaced immediately. The first, that community consent was assured, was completely unsupported. The second, that water supply was adequate, rested on a single consultant’s report that had never been tested. The board paused the expansion, commissioned proper fieldwork, and avoided what would have been a $200 million commitment built on sand.

Contrast this with how most organisations handle their budgeting cycle. Each department submits a bid. The bids are negotiated against available funds. The negotiation happens without reference to why the organisation exists, because that was never stated in terms concrete enough to arbitrate between competing claims. The result is a set of decisions that reflect internal politics, not organisational direction.

Purpose connects decisions across levels

The board decides the strategic direction. Executives decide how to implement it. Managers decide the operational details. Each level makes assumptions that rest on those made at the level above. That stated reason is the thread connecting them. Without it, decisions made at one level can quietly undermine decisions made at another, and nobody notices until the outcomes diverge.

Roger Estall and I saw this pattern across decades of work in mining, aviation, finance, and public health. The organisations that made consistently good decisions were not the ones with the most sophisticated analytical tools or the largest compliance departments. They were the ones where a front-line supervisor could explain how a specific operational decision connected to the organisation’s reason for existing. That connection was not accidental. It was the product of a reason for existing stated clearly enough that it could travel through every layer without losing its meaning.

When disruption arrives, that connection becomes critical. The organisation whose Deciders share a clear reason for existing can adapt quickly, because every person making decisions has the same reference point. The organisation where it exists only as a poster in the foyer cannot adapt, because its people have no shared basis for the new decisions they must now make under pressure. They default to protecting their own area, which is rational from their perspective but incoherent from the organisation’s.

Without Purpose, the autopsy finds sand

Looking back months or years later, the question is simple: did this decision serve that stated reason? If it was never stated, there is nothing to compare against. Every subsequent step, however rigorous, is built on sand. Get this wrong and every assumption you surface, every significance rating you assign, every monitoring trigger you set measures against nothing.

When a Decider faces incomplete information, the question is not "what do I know?" but "what am I assuming, and does my tentative decision serve the reason this organisation exists?" If that reason is absent, there is no way to judge which assumptions are Critical and which are Limited, because what makes an assumption Critical depends on what you are trying to achieve, and that comes straight back to the reason you stated at the start. The entire method depends on this first step. Skip it and you are not deciding. You are guessing with structure.

I tell every board I work with the same thing. State the Purpose before you state the problem. Write it down. Make it specific enough that a reasonable person could test a decision against it and get a clear answer. If you cannot do that, you are not ready to decide. You are ready to have the conversation that precedes deciding, which is the conversation about what this organisation is actually for.

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Grant Purdy is the co-author, with Roger Estall, of Deciding (2020), and the architect of the Universal Decision-Making Method.