Impact at scale happens from the inside out.

Why has enso added organizational culture and leadership development and coaching to our offerings of building mission-driven brands and shared missions?

Our own stated mission is “Impact at Scale.” And so it makes sense that while we uplift organizations and systems in service to that, that we also do that with the people who create those things and fill them.

The truth is that the upstream and truly causal agents in that trifecta are the people — specifically the consciousness of leaders. Impact truly happens from the inside out. Therefore, freeing those consciousnesses up from things like last-century business conditioning, ego, and limiting beliefs about what is possible for them, and connecting them to their own authentic wellspring of purpose, creativity, wisdom, and innovation, can create a powerful diaspora of impact through our organizations, our systems, and the world at large.

As context, we began our mission by helping brands and organizations discover and celebrate their higher selves in shared value campaigns that united business success and positive social impact.

Then, in an effort to increase our impact further, we looked at the systems we were using. We saw an opportunity to evolve the marketing campaign paradigm into something with greater likelihood to create impact at scale. Campaigns are designed as binary systems between an organization and their audience and so are limited in power. We have left that system for a new mechanism we have been developing: Shared Missions. Shared Missions elevate what we do from mere communications campaigns to impact-oriented cultural initiatives that unite not just two, but all sectors of culture: business, philanthropy, government, creative capital, technology, and everyday people, in action toward a common goal that benefits all.

And so, having been engaged first in the uplifting of organizations (profit to shared value) and then of systems (campaigns to shared missions) in service of greater positive impact, we realized we only had two legs to the stool of real cultural transformation. What was missing was the actual engine that generates the seeds, designs, and plans for things like organizations, systems, products, initiatives, and positive change.

People.

There is also the urgency of a workforce that is no longer engaged. A recent Gallup poll has unveiled that globally, only 15% of the workforce is actually engaged in their jobs, while at the same time, enso’s yearly World Value Index survey reveals only 14% of the US workforce feels in alignment with the values of their company.

The peculiar proximity of these two values leads to a potential insight. Perhaps these values are directly proportional. Perhaps if more leaders understood their own personal values and purpose, and then could see the area of alignment between that and the values and mission of the organization they are working in, or even evolve what that mission is, engagement in the organization would be a proportional precipitate of that awareness.

Understanding how critical this alignment is to the impact that organizations and systems can generate, enso is now helping leaders and their teams discover their individual missions and have them bring those together in a mission for the organization or division at large. The result is a confluence of authentic energy that drives inspiration, innovation, creativity, productivity, cultural aliveness and wellbeing.

We have been bringing this to life through vehicles like company intensives, industry workshops, and one-on-one leadership coaching.

Here are some examples:

In our sixth year of working with a division of Google, a largely new team had been assembled and with that a need to galvanize them behind a brand new division initiative. We knew that could only happen to its fullest if the team experienced alignment between their own personal missions and the mission of the business unit, and so we designed an intensive that facilitated the discovery of both. We rented a studio on Universal’s backlot and utilizing creative inspiration from a Disney animation leader and a highly creative program of our design, we led the entire Google team on a journey of self-discovery. First that discovery was their own individual core values and purpose, and then that discovery laddered up to the creation of the values and mission of the division at large. This was made real through the physical manifestation of a jointly built totem that integrated all the values into one beautiful object. The team left invigorated with a profound understanding of each other, the mission of the division, the impact it was setting out to make, and how their personal mission and values align and could play an important role in generating that impact. The values and mission discovery also yielded basic operating principles of the group and even the foundational marketing platform that enso has been bringing to life in new markets.

Recently, in conjunction with the University of Santa Monica, our leadership co-designed and co-led a conference and workshop called Soul Purpose. The intention of the workshop was to unite tenured business leaders with their yet to be discovered personal purpose and missions so they could then vision and design “Act 2” career directions in alignment with those, and be in service to their positive impact in the world. Over seventy executives from industries that ranged from technology to banking to entertainment attended. What was remarkable was that while the vast majority came in with the assumption they’d leave the workshop with a vision that would have them departing from their current situation for something totally new, by the end of the workshop many had the epiphany, through the programming we had developed, that they could integrate their personal mission into the company platform they were in and thereby scale it more quickly and broadly.

Lastly, while enso is working on a global shared mission for a large retail products brand, we are also doing one-on-one coaching with key design leadership in that company. Through facilitating the connection of this leadership to their own core purpose and mission, and freeing them from limiting beliefs around what is actually possible for them, the coaching is supporting this leadership as they align their purpose with the company’s in the bringing of new, positive impact oriented products into the world. In addition, this leadership is now developing their own internal programming with enso so they can share the tools that generated their own transformation to their team and company culture at large.

In enso’s mission of impact at scale, we see the necessity of our work encompassing and lifting the trifecta of people, organizations, and systems. They are, in order, the “why”, the “what”, and the “how” of positive impact.

In the end, what we are discovering is that when it comes to creating impact at scale, there is perhaps no greater scale than the transformation and liberation of one single human consciousness.