Operationalizing purpose between the actual situation and ambition

Moving an organization beyond profit-making into positively and measurably adding value to society helps such organizations to grow in many aspects: the advantages of purpose have been widely documented. To gauge how organizations plan to implement purpose, we surveyed 96 respondents – all responsible for purpose in their organizations – in 61 different Dutch organizations on their actual situation regarding such implementation and their ambition to further operationalize it in the near term.

A K-means clustering of the respondents showed five clusters for the actual situation that neatly showed progression from starting with a purpose to implementing that fully. However, we saw a dichotomy between rather conservative and very aspiring ambitions when clustering the respondents' ambitions. There was no clear direction in the middle, let alone a clear migration path for implementation.