Welcome to our new website

26 Feb 2016

A very warm welcome to the Purpose Partners website and our first ever blog post. So, it seems important to talk about our purpose (we are Purpose Partners after all!).

Discovering wiser ways of living and working together 

What does this mean? How did we get there? 

“Collective clarity of purpose is the invisible leader” (Mary Parker Follett)

Our experience of being in co-creation with others has shown us the truth of this idea. We know that if we are clear on purpose, we can do good work. And we know that if we get lost, we can come back to purpose to help us to be clear about where we are and what’s next.

So, we sat in circle together and had a conversation, or rather, many conversations. These conversations followed our favourite pattern: divergence, emergence and convergence.

We gathered lots of data - from each other and from reading and talking with others. We sat with the discomfort of things not coming easily and quickly, and kept talking, or just waited. And, as we knew it would, our purpose started to become clear. Here’s a glimpse of the scenery on the path we travelled to get to that point.

Discovery

We want to be in a place of not knowing all the answers, of holding ‘what’s right’  lightly, of curiosity, humility and learning. We believe that we are better together, that diversity can give us new insights, and that collective wisdom can emerge when people gather around what matters to them. We also enjoy the delight and excitement of the new.  And so, the word ‘discovery’ clamoured to be part of our purpose. We heard it, and welcomed it in. 

What do we want to discover?

Looking around us, and within us, we can see dominant ways of thinking, being and doing are not serving the Earth and the human race. We clearly need wiser ways of being and doing together. Or, perhaps, some of the old ways - the wisdom of indigenous people who live in harmony with the Earth, the gems at the heart of the wisdom traditions, the old stories we tell that sing with universal truths - are needed alongside new ways of science and technology. And so, we came to ‘wiser ways of living and working.’

How can this be done most wisely?

Human beings may be individually wise or not, but collectively are often not very wise. We recognise the multiple sources of wisdom - wisdom traditions, indigenous peoples, art, brilliant, transformational ideas, and our own inner questions and awareness. We have also seen in action the power of bringing people together, of accessing collective wisdom a group may not know it has. Every day in our practice, we experience that we are ‘better together’, that change comes when we inquire and shift collectively, that people will champion what they helped create. And, the basis of our practice, the Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter, holds working together as a core principle. We had better walk the talk! So, the word ‘together’ emerged. 

Once we had our purpose, our name was easy. And so was everything else. Having a clear and deeply felt and considered purpose has allowed the rest to flow - our values, our principles, our offerings, how we are together, how we practice. When we get lost along the way, we always come back to our purpose, and the way forward is clear again. 

We continue to explore our purpose. We see it, as Frederic Laloux names it it the book Reinventing Organizations as an evolutionary purpose, worthy of listening into and shifting as needed. 

Some deeper questions

• Why do we say ‘living and working’? Why not just ‘living’ given that we believe that work is, or could be, intertwined with our lives, our individual purposes? 
  
• What do we mean when we say ‘work’? Are we just afraid to say what we really mean and call it ‘life’? Are we just hedging - appealing to people who we think might be our ‘customers’, out of a fear of scarcity? Or out of fear of being misunderstood, or not being taken seriously?
  

These questions, and many others, remain alive for us today. We will continue to explore them, and welcome you to do that with us.

So, that’s how we discovered our ‘why’, our purpose, in being together in this practice. It is deeply aligned to our individual purposes, it helps us create our offerings, and it helps us find our way back to what’s important when we are lost. Our purpose is a powerful beacon that guides us, and is our own. What more could we ask of it?

What’s your purpose?