Making Decisions with Purpose

Written by Mollie Isaacks

Use your bold purpose to identify projects aligned with your desired value and impact.

Having an annual plan gives us comfort. We have a list of priorities that our stakeholders have agreed to, and we know what we’re doing in each quarter. But there are two key things that the annual plan does not provide:?

• It doesn’t automatically fill us with purpose and passion for the work we’ve committed to.
• It doesn’t help us with every decision we face about what to work on.

What if we told you there’s a method for prioritizing and aligning your actions with your desired value-add and the impact you want to create? This method starts with something we at Tangram call your bold purpose.

What is a bold purpose?

A bold purpose is bigger than the classic mission and vision. It’s an aggressive, exciting, daring picture of the future state of learning at your organization.

Your bold purpose answers questions like:?

• What concrete impact (results) can we PROMISE the business when we create learning for them??
• What BOLD things can learning do for the business to help them achieve their goals??
• What NEW learning behaviors do we want to cultivate and encourage?

Creating a bold purpose is the first step in our Tangram Formula, which is our proprietary framework that we use to help our clients.

If you want to learn more about how we use it to create experiences with amazing impact, or to get help drafting your own bold purpose, contact us.

Why is this important?

A bold purpose is the big dream that helps learning teams take charge of their destiny. It functions as the North star that guides your thinking, not just for that single year but for the next several years. Senior leaders love to see your articulated bold purpose because it helps them tell the organization the long-term vision for learning at your organization.

Having a bold purpose doesn’t solve every problem. For example, there will still be many cases where all the annual priorities don’t align with your bold purpose. You may feel that you are not making progress toward your bold purpose at every moment. That's okay. Your bold purpose is a shared view of the value and impact you want learning to have. Your team and your stakeholders can refer to it together and use it as a guide.

Once you articulate your bold purpose, you can do so many things with it, like make better decisions! Let’s see what this can look like in action.

Making decisions with purpose

We created a decision tree (find it here for free!) that starts with your bold purpose.

When a new request comes in throughout the year, or a new idea arises from within your team, the first checkpoint is to see if it aligns with your bold purpose or not.

• If yes, then see if there are ways you can drive even more value and impact through this project. In the decision tree, you’ll see questions designed to push you to get the most out of this project, to get you closer to realizing your bold purpose.?
• If it is not aligned with your bold purpose, determine if it’s a required project or not.
• If it’s not required, decline and suggest that the requester find a different way to deliver their training.

• If it is required, see how you can work with the design of the program to help it come more into alignment with your bold purpose. It may not be perfectly aligned, however, redesigning to incorporate some of your value and impact will also increase your progress toward your goals.

When you need to say no to someone requesting training support from your team, it helps to have a DIY training guide to share with them. We can help you create a guide with getting-started ideas to help the requester help themselves. Contact us to get started!

A Tangram example

Let’s look at an example:

At Tangram Learning, our bold purpose is to support learning teams to take?creative, innovative, and fresh steps forward with learning. When we are scoping a new project, we use our bold purpose as a guide to push ourselves and propose a creative and innovative solution to meet their needs.

Sometimes, a prospective client has a project in mind that doesn’t align with our bold purpose. First, we paint the picture of what is possible and show them the ideas we have. We may brainstorm with them about ways we can infuse their project with creativity and innovation.

But, if the project ultimately can’t align with our bold purpose, we tell the client we are not the right partner for them. We direct them to other recommended partners who will be able to support their request. This helps us stay accountable and on track to achieve our big dream — constantly pushing ourselves to add value and impact.

Your turn

• Define your bold purpose as a team.?
• Download the decision tree from our resource library and use it in your team meetings.
• Practice sending some current projects and any known requests through the decision tree.

We are here to support learning teams who have big dreams and want to stretch and innovate. We want everyone to think bigger and join us in our bold purpose. We want to help you with these big goals — to build a learning community, drive learning behaviors, and try new learning techniques.

This post originally appeared on the Tangram Learning blog.

Tangram Learning enables learning teams to deliver excellence for their organization. We are a collective of experienced learning consultants who bring innovation and creativity to every project we work on. We offer staff augmentation, design workshops to kick off your learning projects, development sessions for your team, campaigns that promote your offerings, and 1:1 consulting for leaders.