Constancy of Purpose
More and more I am convinced of the critical value of having a constancy of purpose for an organization. W. Edwards Deming stated that every organization must have an aim that is clear to everyone. William Scherkenbach expressed the aim as a constancy of purpose. He said the constancy of purpose includes four elements: mission or purpose, vision, values, and measures.
At the moment, I am involved with two organizations that are struggling with their constancy of purpose. One of them is a church and one of them is a leadership training organization.
The church is in a mess. A number of members are disappointed with the minister. A number of members are happy with the minister, and they think the problems are systemic and deal with such things as how they treat each other, do they want to grow, and where they should put their priorities. The fact is that they have recently changed their purpose to something that has several elements and that no one can remember. They have a vision statement that is about as visionary as a damp washcloth. They had no written values or guiding principles until recently when they knew they were in trouble and were treating each other badly. And they have no measurements to know how they are doing except their official membership tally which they take once a year, the amount of money contributed annually to the church, and attendance at Sunday services. They are struggling. Chances are the minister will leave, and the church will split – all because they lost their way. They have no constancy of purpose. “Where there is no vision the people perish.”
The leadership training organization is in the midst of doing a strategic plan. They did a strategic plan three years ago. It shows that a lot of thought had gone into it. It calls for working on seven major areas and includes a list of 95 things to do. This is a primarily volunteer membership run organization. You can imagine that not too much of the plan has been accomplished.
The organization has a mission statement, a list of six values, and a position statement which has some elements of vision in it. They have no high level measurements that they track routinely. To begin the new strategic plan, it was decided to ask each person in the room to write the mission statement. No one including the executive director could do it. Each person had some elements of the mission which showed as much as anything their personal interest and mission for the organization.
During planning for the first meeting, we were assured that the organization had its constancy of purpose in order even though they did not have anything they called a vision statement. They just didn’t want to spend more time on doing a vision. “We have done that all before. We are not doing it again.” Well wouldn’t you know it, during the subsequent brainstorming as we developed the key success factors for the new strategic plan, it became clear that they needed to revisit their mission, they needed to develop a vision statement for their future, and they needed to agree on some high level measurements to monitor how well the organization was doing.
Fortunately for this organization, the intervention is happening before they got into serious trouble. Unfortunately for the church, the intervention is probably too late. There will be loss of friendships, loss of momentum, and waste of energy and money all because of not having a current, well understood and followed constancy of purpose.
I hope the organizations you are involved with have a good current constancy of purpose and that you have institutionalized a way of reviewing, renewing and communicating it frequently. It is critical!