Purpose Amnesia

I hired a woman last March. Brilliant. Two Masters degrees. She came from a competitor.

On her third day, I took her for coffee and asked: “So, why does this company exist?”

She smiled politely. “To deliver innovative solutions for-” She stopped. Looked at her cup. “I’m sorry, I actually read that on the careers page. I don’t really know.”

I nodded. Told her not to worry. Told her she’d figure it out.

The truth is, I couldn’t have answered either.

I founded this company seven years ago with a sentence I could say in my sleep: we exist to make compliance invisible for small manufacturers. I said it to investors, to early hires, to my wife at 2am when the doubt hit. That sentence was the spine of every decision we made for the first three years.

Then we grew. Compliance expanded into risk management. Risk management became “enterprise resilience.” The board wanted adjacencies. The sales team wanted broader positioning. Each quarter, the sentence stretched a little further. Nobody changed it. Nobody had to. It just stopped being said.

I went back and checked our last twelve all-hands recordings. Not once did anyone, including me, say the word “compliance.” Our founding reason. Twelve months. Zero mentions.

In signal processing, they call this attenuation: a signal that weakens not because something blocks it, but because nothing amplifies it. The frequency is still there, technically. But the power drops below the noise floor. Every meeting that skipped the “why” was another decibel lost. Eventually, the purpose was still transmitting, but nobody could hear it over the operational noise.

I tried the coffee question with six more people after that. Two gave me the careers page. Three described their department’s function. One, a five-year veteran, said: “Honestly? To make money, I suppose.”

That pause before the answer. That micro-expression of embarrassment. That’s how you diagnose this. You don’t need an audit. You need one honest question asked to one person who hasn’t rehearsed.

The mission didn’t die. I starved it while I was busy.

That silence has a name. Purpose Amnesia. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Untie The Knot

Uproot

The purpose was never distributed. It lived in the founder’s head, maybe in a passionate all-hands speech from 2016. When that person left, went quiet, or got busy, the signal disappeared. This is not a caring failure. It is a transmission failure. The organisation never built a mechanism to pass the “why” from one person to many.

Navigate

Every person on the team can explain why the organisation exists without checking a document. The purpose lives in conversation, not on a slide.

Tool

CORE / Reason: the gravitational center that anchors identity across scale. The CORE framework forces the question “why do we exist?” to be answered in lived behavior, not wall art.

Implement

In your next 1-on-1, ask: “Why does this team exist?” Write down the exact words. Don’t correct them. That gap between their answer and the mission statement is your map.

Emerge

When the purpose is shared (not just stated), hiring criteria sharpen, meetings have natural filters, and “strategic alignment” sessions stop being necessary. People start saying no to the right things.