It is perhaps one of the most difficult questions you want to find an answer for as an organization: formulating a clear mission . A sentence that summarizes what your organization does and especially why.

Now, how do you get there?

This doesn’t have to be as difficult as it may seem at first glance. With the right questions and approach you can make such a mission and your culture explicit quite easily, and I can assist you with that.

Through several workshops, I help you formulate a unique, specific and motivating mission and accompanying values, based on your vision of the future and what is going on in your organization. This is organised in three steps: one session specifically focussed on that mission, in a second step we make the culture explicit by writing out values, then we bring this together and look at the implementation.

How do I do that exactly?

In short, we start with an analysis of existing texts, procedures, intake interviews, you get questionnaires and a number of small preparatory exercises, so that there is a basis to build on. In the sessions we work in a light-hearted, interactive and even playful way. We take a very pragmatic approach, largely using language and images. I create a framework for you to work within.

For the mission statement, we will systematically build a sentence by means of several rounds and subgroups. Everyone has his/her own input, you get to see examples from other organizations and we formulate criteria and rules to see what exactly the mission statement needs to satisfy. On this basis, you make proposals, and we filter and refine them more and more in order to arrive at a final proposal. This exercise is usually done with management.

The mission statement is also a framework to clarify values. The group is broadly composed so that the organization is ‘represented’. What we do exactly is to unravel the culture within your organization. Culture is layered: there are things that are very visible, but also things that lie deeper. The idea is to discover that culture layer by layer, like you peel an orange. What emerges is described, compared and refined until a set of values emerges that reflects what is going on within the organization.

The final step is to bring the mission and values together. In terms of content but also how are you going to communicate about this internally and externally? How do you get everyone on board?  Via a communication and implementation plan, we make everything concrete, so that you can let the mission and values live within your organization.

Because that’s what it’s all about: getting everyone in your organization to endorse and share the mission and values.