Before I look at the org chart, before I review the financials, before I sit in on a leadership team meeting or read a single strategy document, I ask one question.
Why did this organization exist when it was at its best?
Not why it exists now. Not what the mission statement says. Not the version that got wordsmithed by a committee into something technically accurate and completely forgettable. Why it existed when it was doing the thing it was built to do, with the energy and clarity that made it worth building in the first place.
You would be surprised how often people have to think about that for a while. And how much you can learn from watching them think.
Why This Question and Not a Different One
Most organizational problems are not operational problems at their root. They are identity problems. The systems are symptoms. The turnover is a symptom. The stalled growth and the misaligned leadership team and the board that cannot stop micromanaging are all symptoms. The underlying condition is usually an organization that has lost the thread back to its own purpose.
I call this passion archaeology. You are digging through layers of accumulated decisions, pivots, well-intentioned compromises, and the sediment of growth to find the original thing that made the organization worth caring about.
Sometimes it is still alive and intact, just buried. Sometimes it has genuinely shifted and the organization needs to understand that the purpose they were built around no longer matches the work they are actually doing. Both are useful and actionable things to know. Neither of them shows up in a financial report or a board deck.
What the Answers Tell Me
When I ask this question, I pay attention to three things:
- Energy. Does the person light up talking about the founding story, or do they describe it the way you describe a legal structure you inherited? The presence or absence of genuine enthusiasm in how people talk about their organization's origins tells me a great deal about how connected they still feel to the mission.
- Agreement across levels. I ask this question of multiple people at multiple levels of the organization. If the CEO gives me one answer and the frontline staff give me something meaningfully different, I am holding an important piece of diagnostic information. Misalignment on purpose is not a minor issue.
- Specificity. Vague answers are a yellow flag. If the best you can offer is something about serving the community or delivering excellence or making a difference, the organization may have lost contact with what makes it distinct. The most powerful organizational identities are specific. They are about this kind of work, for these people, in this way.
The Organization That Changed My Thinking on This
Early in my career I worked with a nonprofit founded by veterans who wanted to fill a specific gap in services for their community. Over twenty years, the organization had grown, professionalized, and diversified its programming to attract broader funding. Smart moves, on paper.
By the time I arrived, it was a well-run, financially stable organization that had almost no connection to its founding community. The veterans it was built to serve had mostly stopped coming. The staff could not quite explain why. Leadership was focused on sustainability metrics, which is fair, except that the mission was what was supposed to be sustained.
We spent three months doing the archaeology. Talked to founders, early staff, original clients. Found the thread. Made some hard decisions about which programs to scale back in order to recommit to the core work. It was not a comfortable process. Two years later, the organization had rebuilt its connection to the founding community and program outcomes had improved significantly.
The financials followed the mission. In my experience, they almost always do when the direction is clear enough.
