Discovering Your Purpose: Uncovering Your Just Cause.
I would like to take you through an understanding of your motivations and desires and how to formulate working methods of improvement for your own personal development. I have referenced a lot from?The Infinite Game (Simon Sinek)?in this incredible book he explores leadership choices and provides guidelines to implement an "infinite game" plan and how to find genuine cause.
“Finite mindsets focus on winning, whereas infinite mindsets develop a more significant cause than ourselves or our business. Collaborating with others, around a shared purpose, builds a better resourced, and more caring world.” -?Simon?Sinek wrote?The Infinite Game?in 2019
His previous books,?Start with Why,?and?Leaders Eat Last, lay the foundation for this, and his inspiration came from a book called?Finite and Infinite Games. The author of?Finite and Infinite Games,?James Carse, explains how finite-minded leaders play to win, whereas infinite-minded leaders play to keep playing, ultimately for the good of the game. Building from this, Sinek evaluates finite and infinite leadership within different institutions, and he illustrates how remarkably different the results of each mindset can be.
We All Understand a Finite Game –?it has an ending.
If you open any board game, there's usually a pamphlet containing the rules. We understand these games. For instance, if you play chess, Monopoly, or Settlers of Catan, there's a clear set of rules, and the aim is to come first. In the world of sports, the aim is to beat opponents, cross the finish line, get the highest score, or beat the clock. These are finite games, and they're centred around the self, competition, and our innate need to win.
If we apply this to business, currently, many businesses play a finite game, driven by short-term market gains and shareholder demands. They aim to create a winning company in terms of measurable results. But the reality is that each leader's time runs out, but the game lives on. And in business, careers, politics, and parenting, there's no such thing as an end-game winner.
Did you build Lego as a child?
Irrespective of age, most of us know Lego. That's because it's a company that has used an infinite mindset for a long time. Instead of always focusing on the balance sheet, it consistently keeps its purpose, which is 'to create innovative play experiences, and reach more children every year.' A truly successful business is one where a succession of leaders play the infinite game, building something sustainable, that will contribute to the welfare of its staff and customers, and benefit future generations.
Many businesses start out playing an infinite game, but that mindset can shift under new leadership. On the other hand, some organisations decide to shift from a previous finite mindset, to see what's possible with an infinite mindset.
Finite and Infinite Mindset Leaders
There's a fundamental difference between a finite-mindset leader, and an infinite-mindset leader.
Adopting an infinite mindset, requires conscious choice and assertive action, which isn't always easy. Choosing to lead with an infinite mindset, is like deciding to get into better shape, and consistency beats intensity. If we decide to focus on our health, we need to make certain long-term lifestyle choices, and prioritise things such as diet, sleep, and exercise. Similarly, if a business leader wants an organisation to have long-term health, he or she will have to do five things - and importantly - do them all.
Number one, advance a Just Cause.
So, let's unpack these, starting with a Just Cause.
“A?Just Cause?is a specific vision of a?future state?that does not yet exist; a future state?so appealing?that people are willing to make?sacrifices?in order to help?advance?toward that vision.”
“Winning”?provides a temporary thrill of victory; an intense, but fleeting, boost to our self-confidence. None of us can hold on to the incredible feeling of accomplishment for that target we hit, promotion we earned or tournament we won a year ago. Those feelings have passed. To get that feeling again, we need to try to win again.
However, when there is a Just Cause, a reason to come to work that is bigger than any win, our days take on more meaning and feel more fulfilling. Feelings that carry on week after week, month after month, year after year.
In an organisation that is only driven by a finite mindset, we may like our jobs some days, but we will likely never love our jobs.
If we work for an organisation with a Just Cause, we may like our jobs some days, but we will always love our jobs. As with our kids, we may like them some days and not others, but we love them every day.
Think of the WHY like the?foundation of a house, it is the starting point. It gives whatever we build upon it, strength and permanence.
Our Just Cause is the ideal vision of the house we hope to build. We can work a lifetime to build it and still we will not be finished. However, the results of our work help give the house form. As it moves from our imagination to reality it inspires more people to join the cause and continue the work?. . . FOREVER.
For example,?my WHY is to inspire people to do what inspires them so that together we can each change our world for the better. My Just cause is to build a world in which most people wake up inspired, feel safe at work and return home fulfilled at the end of the day, and I am looking for as many people as possible who will join me in this cause.
It is the Just Cause that we are working to advance that gives our work and our lives meaning. A Just Cause inspires us to stay focused beyond the finite rewards and individual wins.
The Just Cause provides the context for all the finite games we must play along the way. A Just Cause is what inspires us to want to keep playing. Whether in science, nation building or business, leaders who want us to join them in their infinite pursuit must offer us, in clear terms, an affirmative and tangible vision of the ideal future state they imagine.
A Just Cause is not the same as our WHY.
A WHY comes from the past. It is an origin story. It is a statement of who we are—the sum total of our values and beliefs.
A Just Cause is about the future. It defines where we are going. It describes the world we hope to live in and will commit to help build. Everyone has their own WHY (and everyone can know what their WHY is if they choose to uncover it). But we do not have to have our own Just Cause, we can choose to join someone else’s. Indeed, we can start a movement, or we can choose to join one and?make it our own.
Unlike a WHY, of which there can be only one, we can work to advance more than one Just Cause. Our WHY is fixed and it cannot be changed. In contrast, because a Just Cause is about something as of yet not built, we do not know exactly the form it will take. We can work tirelessly to build it however we want and make constant improvements along the way.
A Just Cause is something we stand for and believe in, not something we oppose. Leaders can rally people against something quite easily. They can whip them into a frenzy, even. For our emotions can run hot when we are angry or afraid.
Imagine if instead of fighting against poverty, for example, we fought for the right of every human to provide for their own family.
The first creates a common enemy, something we are against. It sets up the cause as if it is “winnable,”. It leads us to believe that we can defeat poverty once and for all. The second gives us a cause to advance.
The impact of the two perspectives is more than semantics. It affects how we view the problem/vision that affects our ideas on how we can contribute. Where the first offers us a problem to solve, the second offers a vision of possibility, dignity and empowerment.
We are not inspired to?“reduce”?poverty, we are inspired to?“grow”?the number of people who are able to provide for themselves and their families. Being for or being against is a subtle but profound difference that the writers of the Declaration of Independence intuitively understood.
Those who led America toward independence stood against Great Britain in the short term. Indeed, the American colonists were deeply offended by how they were treated by England. Over 60 percent of the Declaration of Independence is spent laying out specific grievances against the king. However, the cause they were fighting for was the true source of lasting inspiration, and in the Declaration of Independence it came before anything else.
It is the first idea we read in the document. It sets the context for the rest of the Declaration and the direction for moving forward. It is the ideal to which we personally relate and that we have easily committed to memory.
Few Americans, except for scholars and the most zealous of history buffs, can rattle off even one of the complaints listed later in the document, things like:
“He has endeavored to prevent the Population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for naturalisation of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”
In contrast, most Americans can recite with ease?“all men are created equal”
and can usually rattle off the three tenets of?“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
These words are indelibly marked on the cultural psyche. Invoked by patriots and politicians alike, they remind Americans of who we strive to be and the ideals upon which our nation was founded. They tell us what we stand for.
It takes a lot of?different?flowers to make a bouquet
A well-crafted statement of cause inspires us to offer our ideas, our time, our experience, our hands, anything that may help advance the new vision of the future it articulates.
This is how movements come to be. It starts with a few people.
Their idealised vision of the future attracts believers. Those early adopters don’t show up to get anything, they show up to give. They want to help. They want to play a role in advancing toward a new version of the future.
The Cause that attracted them becomes their own.
Organisations that simply promise to “change the world” or “make an impact” tell us very little about what specifically they want to accomplish. The sentiments are good, but they are too generic to serve as a meaningful filter for us.
Again, a Just Cause is a?specific vision of a future state that does not yet exist; a future state so appealing that people are willing to make sacrifices in order to help advance toward that vision.
We call it “vision” because it must be something we can “see.” For a Just Cause to serve as an effective invitation, the words must paint a specific and tangible picture of the kind of impact we will make or what exactly a better world would look like.
Only when we can imagine in our mind’s eye the exact version of the world an organisation or leader hopes to advance toward will we know to which organisation or to which leader we want to commit our energies and ourselves. A clear cause is what ignites our passions.
“We only hire passionate people” is the oft-recited standard of many a person responsible for hiring. How do they know, however, whether the candidate is passionate for interviewing but not so passionate for the cause? The reality is, EVERYONE is passionate about something, but we aren’t all passionate about the same thing.
Infinite-minded leaders actively seek out employees, customers and investors who share a passion for the Just Cause.
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For employees, this is what we mean when we say, “Hire for culture and you can always teach the skills later.”
For customers and investors, this the root of love and loyalty for the organisation itself.
The quick-serve salad company Sweetgreen stands for something bigger than selling salads, for example, and they invite would-be contributors to join their cause. Their stated mission is “to inspire healthier communities by connecting people to real food.”
Real food, as Sweetgreen defines it, means ingredients from local sources that support local farms. Which is why their stores have different menus depending on which part of the country they are in.
Though many of us may buy their salads just because we like their salads, those who are devoted to locally sourced food and want to support local farms will be drawn to work for and become the most loyal supporters of Sweetgreen. They will make sacrifices, like going out of their way or paying a premium, to buy from Sweetgreen.
Supporting the company in some shape or form is one of the things they do to feel that they are advancing their own values and beliefs, their own vision of a better world. They feel included in the cause.
Service to others?is the?rent you pay?for your place here on?earth.
A Just Cause must involve at least two parties—the contributors and the beneficiaries. The givers and receivers.
Contributors give something, e.g., their ideas, hard work or money, to help advance the Just Cause. And the receivers of those contributions benefit.
For a Just Cause to pass the service-orientation test, the primary benefit of the organisation’s contributions must always go to people other than the contributors themselves.
If there is only one party, if we are the sole beneficiaries of our work, that’s not a Just Cause, that’s a vanity project. When Sweetgreen talks about the beneficiaries of its contributions, they talk about communities and people. They don’t talk about what their contributions will do for Sweetgreen.
The drafters of the Declaration of Independence were clear that “We the people,” not “We the leaders,” would be the primary beneficiaries of their efforts and of the Revolution. If those who led the fight had made themselves the primary beneficiaries, then America probably would have ended up with a dictatorship or an oligarchy.
With that new perspective, we instantly see what follows when a company says the primary beneficiaries of their work are shareholders, not customers.
The operative word in all this is?“primary.”
Service orientation does not mean charity. In charity, the vast majority, if not all, the benefit of our contributions must go to the receiver. And any benefit the contributor gets is the good feeling that they contributed.
In business, of course we can consider how our work will benefit us or advance our own lot. Of course we can expect and even demand to be fairly compensated and recognised for our efforts and results. We can want our investors to benefit too, just not at the expense of the company, the people who work there or the customers who buy from us. No beneficiary, no customer, should be forced to buy a substandard product and no employee should lose their job as a result of cost cutting performed to benefit a shareholder, who is, after all, just one of a group of contributors.
Again, only when the primary beneficiary of the cause is someone other than the organisation itself can the cause be Just. This is what “servant leadership” means. It means the primary benefit of the contributions flows downstream. In an organisation where service orientation is lacking (or treated as a sideshow rather than the main event), the flow of benefits tends to go upstream instead.
Investors invest with the primary intention of seeing a return before anyone else. Leaders make decisions that benefit themselves before those in their charge. Salespeople ensure they do whatever they need to do to make the sale to earn their bonus, regardless of what the customer needs. This is the common flow of benefit in so many of our organisations today.
Too many of our cultures are filled with people working to protect their own interests and the interests of those above them before those of the people they are supposed to be serving. The requirement that a Just Cause be service oriented is consistent with how infinite games are supposed to be played. The infinite player wants to keep the game going for others.
A leader who wishes to build an organisation equipped for the Infinite Game must never make decisions solely to boost their own compensation. Their efforts should go toward equipping the organisation for the game in which it is operating. Even an investor must not be the primary beneficiary of their investment. Rather it is the organisation in which they believe and whose Just Cause they want to see advanced that must benefit from their financial contribution. An infinite-minded investor wants to contribute to advance something bigger than themselves—which, if it is successful, will be highly profitable.
A finite-minded investor?is more like a gambler who bets solely so they may reap the reward. Let us not confuse the two behaviours. The reason a service orientation is so important in the Infinite Game is because it builds a loyal base of employees and customers (and investors) who will stick with the organisation through thick and thin. It is this strong base of loyalty that gives any organisation a kind of strength and longevity that money alone cannot provide.
The most loyal employees feel their leaders genuinely care about them . . . because their leaders genuinely do care about them.
In return, they offer their best ideas, act freely and responsibly and work to solve problems for the benefit of the company.
The most loyal customers feel the company genuinely cares about their wants, needs and desires . . . because the company really does.
And in return, therefore loyal customers go out of their way or pay a premium to buy from that company over another and encourage their friends to do the same. And the best-led companies feel like their investors genuinely care about helping the company become as strong as possible in order to advance the cause because the investors really do care. The results benefit all stakeholders.
People who wish to lead with an?infinite mindset?would do well to keep the example of the Declaration of Independence in mind. The founders’ stated commitment to equality and unalienable human rights are evergreen.
Over the course of more than 240 years, even as the nation’s leaders, landscape, people and culture have changed, the Just Cause has remained as relevant and inspiring as ever. It is a Just Cause for an infinite time frame.
A Just Cause must be greater than the products we make and the services we offer. Our products and services are some of the things we use to advance our cause. They are not themselves the Cause.
If we articulate our cause in terms of our products, then our organisation’s entire existence is conditional on the relevance of those products.
Any new technology could render our products, our cause and indeed our entire company obsolete overnight.
The American railroads, for example, were some of the largest companies in the country. Until advancements in automotive technology and a network of highways offered people a quicker and sometimes cheaper alternative to the train. Had the railroads defined their need to exist in terms related to moving people and things instead of advancing the railroad, they might be the owners of major car companies or airlines today.
Publishers saw themselves in the book business instead of the spreading-ideas business and thus missed the opportunity to capitalise on new technology to advance their cause. They could have invented Amazon or the digital e-reader. Had the music industry defined themselves as the sharers of music rather than sellers of records, tapes and CDs they would have had an easier time in a world of digital streaming.
By defining themselves by a cause greater than the products they sold, they could have invented services like iTunes or Spotify. But they didn’t . . . and now they are paying the price for it.
Markets will rise and fall, people will come and go, technologies will evolve, products and services will adapt to consumer tastes and market demands. We need something with permanence for us to rally around. Something that can withstand change and crisis.
To keep us in the Infinite Game, our cause must be durable, resilient and timeless.
When the signers of the Declaration of Independence affirmed that all men?“are created equal”?and?“endowed . . . with certain unalienable Rights,”?they were referring primarily to white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant men. Almost immediately, however, there were efforts to advance a more expansive and inclusive understanding of the ideal.
During the Revolutionary War, for example, George Washington forbade anti-Catholic organising in his armies and regularly attended Catholic services to model the behaviour he expected of his men. Nearly a hundred years later, the Civil War brought about an end to slavery, and soon after that the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship and equal rights to African Americans and former slaves.
The women’s suffrage movement took another step toward America’s Just Cause when it gained the vote for women in 1920. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which protected African Americans and others from discrimination, were two more steps. The nation took yet another step in 2015 with the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which extended the protections guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to gay marriage.
If the founders of the United States had only set out a goal—to win independence—once it was achieved, they would have grabbed a pint of ale and sat around playing rounds of ninepins and ring taw while regaling each other with how great it was that they won the war. But that’s not what happened. Instead, they got to work writing a constitution (which was only fully ratified seven years after the official end of the Revolutionary War) to further codify a set of enduring principles to protect and advance their big, bold, idealistic vision of the future. A vision that Americans have been striving to protect and advance ever since quill and ink touched paper . . . and will continue to protect and advance as long as we have the will and resources to do so. America’s Just Cause has yet to be fully realised, and for all practical purposes it never will be.
But we will die trying. And that’s the point.
Indeed, the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights Act and gay rights are some of the big steps the nation has taken to realise its cause. And though each of those movements, infinite, are still far from complete, they still represent clear steps along the nation’s march toward the ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. It is important to celebrate our victories, but we cannot linger on them. For the Infinite Game is still going and there is still much work to be done. Those victories must serve as milestones of our progress toward an idealised future.
They give us a glimpse of what our idealised future can look like and serve as an inspiration to keep moving forward.
This is what the idealised journey of a Just Cause feels like—no matter how much we have achieved, we always feel we have further to go. Think of a Just cause like an iceberg. All we ever see is the tip of that iceberg, the things we have already accomplished. In an organisation, it is often the founders and early contributors who have the clearest vision of the unknown future, of what, to everyone else, remains unseen.
The clearer the words of the Just Cause, the more likely they will attract and invite the innovators and early adopters, those willing to take the first risks to advance something that exists almost entirely in their imaginations.
With each success, a little more of the iceberg is revealed to others; the vision becomes more visible to others. And when others can see a vision become something real, skeptics become believers and even more people feel inspired by the possibility and willingly commit their time and energy, ideas and talents to help advance the cause further. But no matter how much of the iceberg we can see, our leaders have the responsibility to remind us that the vast majority still lies unexplored.
For no matter how much success we may enjoy, the Just Cause for which we are working lies ahead and not behind..
Focus moves from beyond the horizon to the dials in front of them.
Without a Just Cause to guide them, finite-mindedness starts to creep in. The leaders will celebrate how fast they are going or how many miles they have travelled but fail to recognise that their journey lacks any direction or purpose.
A Just Cause that is preserved on paper can be handed down from generation to generation; a founder’s instinct cannot.
Like the Declaration of Independence, a written statement of cause dramatically increases the chances that the cause will survive to guide and inspire future generations beyond the founders and those who knew the founders. It’s the difference between a verbal contract and a written contract. Both are legal and enforceable, but when a contract is written it prevents any confusion or disagreement about the terms of the deal . . . especially for people who weren’t there when the deal was made.
A written cause works like a compass. And with a compass in hand, each succession of leaders, their gaze looking beyond the horizon, can more easily navigate the technologies, politics and cultural norms of the day without the founder present.
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