When purpose gets lost in the pace of change

This is part of a series of 10 posts exploring the questions behind The Sticky Change Sense Check – a free tool for leaders navigating organisational change. If you’d like to read it from the beginning, When change energy goes unmanaged: the human cost is where we started.

---

You only have to look at your diary or other people’s calendars to see that the organisation is really busy! It’s a problem that people often bring to coaching… How do they prioritise their time when there is so much to do and so much to achieve?

Our answer is often: ‘What do you think your purpose is? And if your role/team/organisation didn’t exist, why would it be created?’

Because when the pressure is on we very often lose sight of why we are doing all this important stuff, of what really matters. 

Furthermore, if you were to ask different members of the team or the organisation the same questions, chances are they would all give you different answers.  

Because when change is moving fast, leaders can often think they’ve communicated the ‘why’ clearly but the reality may be that this is a dangerous assumption. And if that assumption resonates with you, it’s one we’d like to challenge.

Purpose isn’t a strategy document

When we talk about purpose in the context of change, we don’t mean the vision statement or the transformation strategy. We mean something more immediate and more personal.

The answer to the question that practically every person in an organisation is asking when change is announced – what does this mean for me and why should I give it my energy?

This is not an unreasonable question. It is, in fact, the most human question imaginable. And yet it’s the one that many change programmes sometimes fail to answer. Not because leaders don’t have an answer but because they can mistake communicating the strategy for communicating the purpose. 

A strategy tells people what is happening. Purpose tells them why it matters. These are not the same thing, and people can follow one quite faithfully while remaining entirely unconvinced by the other. 

In our experience, the organisations that move through change most effectively are the ones where leaders have done the harder work of connecting the change to something people actually care about, not just the business case but the meaning behind it. It’s about sitting down with people and rather than talking about the actions, getting them to reflect on: What are we trying to create? What will be better? What are we protecting, even as things change? These are the questions that turn a change programme into something people actually want to be part of.

What happens when purpose is absent

The consequences of leading change without a clear, meaningful sense of purpose tend to be gradual rather than sudden. People don’t usually down tools or openly resist. What happens instead is subtler and, in many ways, harder to address. 

People do what's asked of them, but they stop going beyond it. The creative thinking, the proactive problem-solving, the willingness to raise a concern before it becomes a crisis, and these are the first things to drain away when people don't feel genuinely connected to what they're doing.

Alongside this, people become skilled at waiting to be told what to do next rather than taking initiative. This might look like compliance and in the short term it often gets mistaken for it. But compliance and commitment are very different things, and organisations that mistake one for the other tend to find out the hard way, usually when the pressure increases and the willingness they were counting on simply isn't there.

And then there is the exhaustion that doesn’t respond to rest. When people are working hard but don’t feel their work is connected to something meaningful, the tiredness accumulates in a way that a weekend or even a holiday doesn’t touch. It's the particular tiredness that comes from working hard at something you've stopped believing in.

Dan Pink’s research on motivation is useful here. His work, drawn together in Drive, makes the case that people are not primarily motivated by external reward, but by autonomy, mastery and purpose. In a change context, it’s the last of these that most organisations underinvest in reflecting on and communicating. The plan gets communicated. The timeline gets shared. But the meaning, the genuine, human reason why this matters, is often assumed rather than articulated. 

Speed and purpose are not opposites

The argument for leading with purpose is not an argument for slowing down. It is not about taking the foot off the accelerator or adding another layer of consultation before anything can happen. 

The organisations that sustain change most effectively are often moving very fast. What distinguishes them isn’t the pace; it’s the fact that people understand what they’re moving towards and why. Purpose doesn’t slow change down. It makes the pace sustainable. 

Recovering the thread

Reconnecting a change effort to its purpose is not a communications exercise, though communication is part of it. It requires leaders to be genuinely clear, first with themselves and then with their people, about what this change is really for. 

That means being willing to sit with people and reflect on the harder questions honestly, not just “what are we doing?” but “why does it matter, and what will genuinely be better when we get there?” And perhaps the one that gets asked least often, “what’s in this for the people who are being asked to execute it?”

It also means being consistent. Purpose communicated once, in a town hall or a strategy document, is not purpose embedded. It becomes real through the conversations leaders have day to day, the way they talk about the change in a team meeting, the questions they ask, the things they choose to prioritise and the things they’re willing to let go of. Purpose is demonstrated through behaviour far more than it is communicated through messaging. 

And when purpose has been lost, when the pace has outrun the meaning, it can be recovered. But it requires leaders to be honest about what has happened. Not to pretend that the why was always clear but to name the fact that it got lost, reconnect people to what matters and create the space for the questions that should have been asked earlier to be asked now. That kind of honesty, in our experience, does more to restore momentum than any amount of additional communication ever will. 

💭 In your organisation right now, if you asked people at every level why this change is happening, would the answers match yours?

If this has resonated, The Sticky Change Sense Check is a free, 10-question tool designed to help senior leaders, HR and OD professionals see clearly where their change energy is well-channelled and where it needs attention. 

Download The Sticky Change Sense Check

References

Pink, D. (2009). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Riverhead Books.