Walking the purpose talk: A series exploring how leaders bring purpose to life by aligning what they do with what they say they stand for.

Innovation

Over the past decade, purpose has moved from the margins to the mainstream of business thinking. Many organisations now have a clearly articulated purpose, a statement that explains why they exist and what they seek to contribute beyond financial return.

Far fewer, however, are genuinely driven by one.

Being driven by purpose is not about intent or aspiration. It is about consequence. It shows up in what products and services an organisation chooses to sell, which markets it participates in, which revenues it is prepared to forgo, and which opportunities it actively pursues. When purpose is real, it constrains as much as it inspires.

In a genuinely purpose-driven organisation, purpose acts as the single organising idea of the enterprise. It sits at the core of strategy, not running in parallel with it, not competing with commercial priorities, but actively shaping them. It informs decisions across the whole system: sales and marketing, systems and processes, communications, products and services, innovation, people and culture, procurement, and leadership itself.

This is where many organisations struggle. Purpose is identified, sometimes eloquently, but the business continues to operate much as it did before. Strategy advances down one track; purpose runs alongside it on another. Over time, that separation creates inconsistency, confusion and accusations of hypocrisy labelled as purpose-washing.

This series of articles is written to prompt reflection for leaders navigating that terrain. Some will already have a stated purpose and be grappling with how to align the organisation around it. Others may sense that something more is required but are unsure where to begin. The intent here is not to prescribe the Single Organising Idea (SOI®) methodology, but to surface the questions leaders need to ask if purpose is to become operational rather than ornamental.

We are starting with innovation. Not because it is the first domain every organisation should address, but because it is one of the most revealing. Innovation is not just about the new ideas an organisation chooses to explore and invest in. It is also where intent meets investment, and where the gap between words and action becomes visible very quickly.

Seen this way, innovation becomes a discipline of focus rather than creativity alone. It exposes whether purpose is genuinely shaping priorities, or simply sitting in the background as an expression of good intent.

 

Innovation as a test of seriousness

Innovation is often treated as a signal of ambition, evidence that an organisation is looking forwards rather than backwards. But viewed through the lens of purpose, innovation reveals something more exacting — whether an organisation is prepared to act differently, not just think differently.

This is why innovation so often exposes the gap between what organisations say they are here to do and what they actually prioritise. It is one thing to articulate a purpose; it is quite another to allow that purpose to shape where time, talent and capital are deployed.

When purpose is genuinely at work, innovation priorities change. Leaders move beyond asking what could we do next? to what should we do next, and why? Initiatives are judged not only on commercial potential, but on coherence with the organisation’s core idea. The result is not less innovation, but more deliberate innovation.

A useful illustration can be seen in Patagonia®. Far from constraining growth, Patagonia’s environmental purpose has actively shaped the company’s innovation agenda, from product design and materials science to repair, resale and circular business models. Initiatives such as Worn Wear, supply-chain transparency and long-term product durability were not bolt-ons to a conventional growth strategy; they flowed directly from a clear point of view about what the company exists to do.

Importantly, this clarity has not diminished commercial performance. Patagonia has grown, not in spite of its purpose, but because its innovation efforts are coherent, differentiated and trusted. Purpose narrowed the field of possibility, and in doing so, strengthened both relevance and resilience.

 

Innovation is ultimately a leadership choice

For all the language of creativity and experimentation, innovation does not happen in a vacuum. It is shaped, consciously or otherwise, by leadership decisions, incentives, risk appetite and what the organisation chooses to reward or protect.
When purpose is peripheral, innovation defaults to familiar measures: speed, return, imitation. When purpose is central, those measures are supplemented by a more searching question: does this advance what we are here to do?

This does not replace commercial discipline; it refines it. Organisations that take purpose seriously do not innovate indiscriminately, they innovate coherently. They are clearer about the value they seek to create, and the value they are prepared to walk away from. Over time, that coherence compounds.

 

A revealing place to begin

Innovation is not the only domain that must align with purpose. Communications, systems, culture, leadership and measurement all matter, and each will surface different tensions. But innovation is a revealing place to begin because it forces intent into contact with reality.

It challenges leaders to move beyond aspiration and ask whether purpose is actively organising decisions, priorities and trade-offs, or merely accompanying them.

Purpose sets direction. Innovation reveals whether the organisation is actually moving.

In the next article, I’ll turn to another domain where this gap becomes visible very quickly — communications, and how misalignment there can undermine even the strongest intentions.