Purpose
Purpose Launchpad was developed with the purpose of empowering extraordinary people to create a better future.
The world faces challenges of all sizes and types, and, at the same time, these challenges are the best opportunities to create something new that not only solves the challenge, but equally makes a positive impact in the world.
Traditional organisations have a vision (‘what’ they want to become in the future) and a mission (‘how’ they will make their vision true).
Purpose-driven organisations have a clear reason ‘why’ they exist in addition to their vision and mission. Purpose describes the way these organisations envision a better world and provides them with a meaningful and powerful path to follow. It enables them to make their reach a far greater and their impact far bigger. It’s key to remember that the biggest challenges also make the greatest business opportunities.
However, it’s also true that building a new organisation focused on solving an unsolved challenge (and eventually making a business) is very difficult. The fact that innovation is always risky and involves uncertainty is only one factor but building something new turns people into explorers and this is another factor that most people aren’t equipped for.
Most of our education is geared towards avoiding failure, to pass exams, to follow a pre-established path and to design and execute a plan that leads us to success.
In order to explore the unknown and to create new things, we need more than a set of steps and tools, we need to think differently. That’s why Purpose Launchpad was designed in a manner that will not only help us build purpose-driven initiatives, but also evolve our mindset to discover the right path to create a new organisation, business, product, or service that will make a positive impact in the world.
Definition
Purpose Launchpad is an agile framework to help people operate with the right mindset to successfully generate new initiatives and/or evolve existing organisations (startups or corporates) to make a massive impact.
Purpose Launchpad can be implemented on three different levels:
- As a mindset, when applied as a set of principles taking into account the phase that the initiative is.
- As a guided toolkit (and as a mindset), when applied as a set of tools and methodologies to evolve the different dimensions (axes) of the initiative.
- As an agile framework (and as a guided toolkit and as a mindset), when applied in a rigorous way running periodic Purpose Launchpad sprints that drive the team to continuously evolve the initiative.
Developing the right innovative organisation, business, product, or service that can make a positive impact is not about technology, it’s not even about applying the right methodology, it’s about the mindset we operate with. Therefore, Purpose Launchpad is a way to get the right mindset to become a successful purpose-driven innovator and/or entrepreneur.
However, changing people’s mindset is not an easy task. The only way to do it is through embodied experience – learning (and unlearning) by doing. While implementing the Purpose Launchpad, we will not only evolve our initiative, but also people’s mindset; and that’s the most powerful evolution we can undertake since projects might fail but people stay and will be able to keep developing new initiatives that will eventually make a true impact.
Purpose Launchpad Principles
The Purpose Launchpad Principles encapsulates the essence of the mindset that Purpose Launchpad tries to install in practitioners. Even if we don’t use any of the tools, just following the Purpose Launchpad principles can bring extraordinary results. Implementing Purpose Launchpad properly will always require applying the following principles, which are the core of the framework and the mindset:
- Purpose over problem, and problem over solution.
- Exploration outcomes over optimisation.
- Customers’ insights over market research.
- Abundance over scarcity.
- Meaningful incomes over investment.
- Mindset over processes and tools.
- Validated learnings before building.
- Qualitative metrics over quantitative metrics.
- Purpose-driven synergies over competition.
- Long-term impact over short-term profit.
Purpose Launchpad Phases
The initiatives that go through Purpose Launchpad typically pass through three (3) different phases (exploration, evaluation and impact). Depending on the phase where the initiative is at, Purpose Launchpad will be applied in a different way.
Each of the three Purpose Launchpad phases involve different types of mindset and ways to evolve the initiative as explained below.
Exploration
When we start a new initiative there are two challenges we need to consider in order to find the right way to implement it. On the one hand, it’s important to consider that new ideas are just hypotheses that require experimentation. On the other hand, it’s even more important to consider that we don’t even know all the possible hypotheses at the very beginning, so we will need to equally discover the things that we don’t even know that we don’t know.
During the exploration phase, we need to look around in order to discover all the different possible paths to develop our initiative, keeping the purpose in the middle. Also, we will do initial rapid and soft experiments (customer interviews, product mockups, etc.) without building anything at this point (remember that one of our principles is ‘Validated learning before building’). This will allow us to partially evaluate the hypothesis in order to pick the most promising path to further develop our initiative.
Evaluation
Hypotheses however cannot be fully validated (or invalidated) with just initial rapid and soft experiments. For example, we can’t fully validate a specific solution just because a significant number of potential customers told us they would use it and even pay for it. We will need to have real customers paying for it, and even having them happy to use the real solution in order to fully validate it.
During the evaluation phase we will start running real tests, which will go beyond testing just the idea. This will be done in the different areas of our initiative in order to evaluate whether our partially validated hypotheses are true or not. The key during the evaluation phase will be maximising the validated learnings while minimising the investment in terms of time and other resources. The focus will be on iterating our initiative based on the validated learnings in order to prepare it to scale.
Impact
The final goal we all have is making an impact and, in many cases, making a profit too. In order to do that, we will need to optimize and scale our initiative. We shouldn’t do this if we haven’t yet identified and validated the path to achieving our purpose. but only do this once we have properly implemented the exploration and evaluation phases. Then we will be ready to make a massive impact.
In the impact phase, it’s time to think about how to reach the mass market, how to improve the user experience of our solutions, how to optimize and even automate our operations. We will need people focused on execution in order to take our initiative, and the impact we can make, to the next level.
It is also important to mention that these phases aren’t a linear process where we only operate in the phase we are at. Purpose Launchpad phases are a cumulative process, meaning that when we are in the exploration phase, we only focus on implementing the exploration approach. However, when we are in the evaluation phase, we also need to keep the exploration approach, and when we are in the impact phase we also need to keep both the evaluation and exploration approaches.
The fact that Purpose Launchpad Phases are not a set of steps that follow a linear process but a set of modes that we should apply in a cumulative way is the main reason why the Purpose Launchpad icon shows an iterative cyclical process where we see the different Purpose Launchpad Phases’ colors as layers, meaning that we always keep active the previous ones too.