How my father and a bunch of Post-its led me to one of my firsts in business

In this series, professionals discuss their experiences accomplishing something for the first time. Read their stories here, then write your own using #IWasTheFirst in the body of the post. 

In 1992, I was in high school while my father was a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan. My fondest memory of that time was watching him map his ideas for his dissertation. He began with an insight from a conversation, research, or a book. He then would roll these giant sheets of paper out across the table, on which he would jot down the insight and circle it. He added circle after circle, drawing lines to show their relationships. When he wasn’t around, I would pull out his maps and look at them, trying to decipher his lines, words, and circles—it was a map of his mental world, and looking at it made me feel like I was inside it.

Twenty years later, I began creating my own circles with my own insights. My circles took the form of Post-it notes stuck on my office window at the Taproot Foundation, which overlooked the downtown New York City skyline. For over a year, I arranged and rearranged them, trying to find a pattern and an answer to a question I had been studying for a long time: Is there a science to social impact? How could the work I was doing at the Taproot Foundation have a bigger impact? Billions of dollars are spent each year trying to move the needle on issues from education to poverty, but what was working? Is it possible to predict success? How could someone design a social impact effort with a high probability of creating change?

Five Levers of Social Change

The breakthrough came as patterns emerged between the Post-its. The patterns became what I later termed the Five Levers for Social Change in a series for the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Based on my research of successful social change efforts, there appeared to be only five ways that social change was ever proactively created: research, policy, public perceptions, disruptive technology, and bright spots. This framework radically shrunk the challenge of architecting social change efforts. What had seemed infinite and overwhelming had become finite and relatively easy to navigate.

Once this framework emerged, I took it on the road to see if anyone could break it.

Entrepreneurs, local foundations, even folks at the White House couldn’t find an example of a social change that had been created using an approach other than one of the five levers. But as I continued to test the framework, I personally found that the five levers weren’t enough. Putting the levers to work required large groups of people working together across sectors, backgrounds, and experiences.

Leaders weren’t listening to each other or respecting the perspectives of their partners. They were talking at each other, not with each other. They were getting stuck just defining an issue, much less selecting the right levers to pull.

Soon, a new set of Post-it notes began to pop up on my window. Why did such smart people see issues so differently and have so much trouble understanding the perspectives of their peers? How could we get people to work together to put the five levers into action? The answer took about three months to emerge as I moved my Post-it notes around in-between conference calls and meetings.

As I mapped out all the diverse approaches to advancing progress, five distinct perspectives emerged. I came to understand that these diverse perspectives constituted the core of not only how people created change and progress in the world, but also how they experienced purpose in their lives and careers. These perspectives embodied a new kind of diversity, a diversity of purpose.

Purpose is a Verb

Like so many people, I always thought that gaining purpose in life was about finding my cause. When coaching or mentoring people over the years, purpose always seemed to find expression through a noun—immigration, civil rights, education, and so on. And yet, this never accurately described the many people I knew who worked in jobs that had no “cause,” but still felt a strong sense of purpose in their work, or others who had found purpose working across many causes. What started to become clear to me was that defining personal purpose wasn’t about finding a noun, but instead about finding a verb—an action. It’s not only what you are doing, but how you do it, and thereby relate to the world. For example, when we assemble a group of leaders in education, we think they share a purpose, but, in fact, they only share a cause. Until they can understand the diversity of purpose in the room, the cause has little hope of moving forward or creating meaningful change.

A New Organizing Principle for Work

In 2013 I left the Taproot Foundation to start Imperative with Arthur Woods. We realized that the discoveries I had made about purpose created a new language and means for organizing our work, collaborating and connecting with other people in powerful ways.

We worked with a team of psychologists and designers to develop the first assessment for purpose. It enables someone in ten minutes to uncover their purpose and begin to understand how to design their work to be deeply meaningful.

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Aaron Hurst is an Ashoka Fellow, award-winning entrepreneur and globally recognized leader in fields of purpose at work and social innovation. He is the CEO of Imperative and founder of the Taproot Foundation which he led for a dozen years. Aaron is the author of the Purpose Economy and has written for or been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg TV and Fast Company.