Creating a Mission Statement and Strategy
If you are in a new role, you are going to need to develop this yourself. This is the fun part. Research, research, research. I can’t stress that enough. Do not try to come up with something off the bat and think it’s awesome. If you’re new to a role, it can take up to 8 months to learn the role even if you think you’re all over it so don’t get too cocky. If it falls to you to do this, work with your manager or your peers in other organisations to figure out a common theme. If you can work with sister agencies and have a common mission statement to achieve something for the benefit of a whole, you’re going to immediately be seen as a leader and someone to stand with.
Here is the methodology I work through with everything I do….. It’s my process. I sit with ideas, what I’m trying to achieve, draw, sketch, talk, have multiple coffees with people and test out lots of mission statements to ensure I’ve got the general gist of what is going on. Sometimes in work it’s hard to ingest multiple streams of information.
I should note – I work in a data and information world, so my way of thinking might be unique to the speciality but I think the ground work of thinking is still there across any roles.
This stuff is common sense – we wouldn’t try to make up a new recipe to spaghetti Bolognese each time we wanted to make it, we look it up. Once you’ve done the work so many times, you will learn to memorize it and can throw in other ingredients depending on the audience.
I’d be keen to hear from people if you have any drastically different ways of working through things like this. In later articles i’ll go through the art of sensemaking with drawings.