There was a decision I made early in my leadership that I have returned to many times since.
A second contract was on the table. It would bring in significant funds, utilise our full staffing capacity, and keep the organisation financially viable at a moment when viability was genuinely uncertain.
It would also mean not taking our next cohort of the people the organisation existed to serve. They would have to wait, or not come at all because we needed the contract more than we needed to honour the purpose in that moment.
We took the contract.
And in that decision, purpose moved from the centre of the organisation to a shelf. No announcement, without a meeting where anyone said: we are no longer doing what we said we were here to do.
How purpose leaves the room
Purpose rarely disappears dramatically. There is no one single moment where a leader stands up and says: we are setting aside our values now. It happens in smaller decisions, made under pressure, where survival and purpose pull in different directions — and survival wins.
It might happen once, then again, then again after that, until the pattern has become the organisation’s actual operating logic. Regardless of what is written in the mission statement.
The language of purpose stays, the website still carries it. The values are still on the wall, everyone still speak about impact and meaning and the reason the organisation exists. However, the decisions, the real ones that matter, made under intense pressure, tell a different story.
Purpose moves to a shelf, it’s not abandoned or disowned. It still gets referenced, still believed in, still genuinely intended. Just no longer structurally entwined in the backbone of the organisation anymore, it has started to unravel and it is not the primary factor when making choices.
The gap between purpose as aspiration and purpose as a living force in decisions has started to appear
Why the gap opens
The gap does not open because leaders stop caring about purpose. It opens because the systems most organisations operate inside were not designed to keep purpose central under pressure.
When survival is at stake, when the bills need paying, when shareholders are pushing for returns, when a contract is on the table that will keep the lights on, the system has a clear answer. Take the money, optimise for continuity, keep the lights on. Purpose can wait.
This logic is not always wrong, organisations that do not survive cannot serve anyone. The tension between purpose and survival is real, and any leader who pretends it is not has not yet been tested by it.
There is a difference, however, between a decision made under genuine constraint, where the trade-off is seen clearly, named honestly, and understood as a trade-off. Where the decision made is discussed in-depth and the wider implications on purpose faced. When a pattern of decisions where purpose is lower down the order of how decisions are made, then ultimately when it has stopped being a factor at all.
The gap first opens when leadership comes under pressure, the second is drift away from the core purpose. The difference between them is how far away from the table is purpose’s seat placed when difficult decisions are being made.
What purpose coherence looks like
Purpose coherence is not purity, it is not the absence of compromise or the luxury of never having to choose between what matters and what is necessary. Leaders who are waiting for conditions in which purpose and survival are always aligned will wait a long time.
What coherence looks like is something more demanding and more honest than that: it is the practice of keeping purpose visible, front and centre, in every significant decision, especially when the decision goes against it.
That means naming the trade-off when it exists. The decision being made for survival reasons with full understanding what it costs in terms of purpose. The Board coming together with no pretence, with a commitment to return to the purpose as soon as the conditions allow.
That is a different quality of leadership than letting purpose drift unacknowledged. It keeps the tension alive rather than resolving it through denial, it preserves the integrity of the organisation, in a way that drift does not.
When decisions affecting purpose are made many times over, the deeper questions start to arise. Is everyone on the Board fully committed to purpose as originally thought or has its position moved down the list of priorities as time and the pressures of life have gone on. Asking these pre-emptive questions of everyone means at crucial moments the gap that starts to appear is understood fully and no-one is caught unaware.
It also requires something most organisations do not build in: the time, the space, and the structure to ask the deeper questions. Not in a strategy away-day once a year but embedded into the rhythm of how decisions get made, the wider effects of the decision not just the stand-alone decision.
Three questions worth sitting with
These, perhaps uncomfortable questions are designed to tell you something true about where purpose really lives in your organisation at this moment.
Reflection 01
If you removed your mission statement from the wall and looked only at your last ten significant decisions — what purpose would they reveal?
Not the purpose you intend but the purpose that is visible in what you have chosen, under pressure, when something had to give. That gap, if it exists, is worth understanding with precision about what else it is telling you.
Reflection 02
What is your organisation currently optimising for — and when did that become the centre?
Most organisations optimise for something: revenue, growth, shareholder return, a funder’s priorities, impact at any cost, survival. These are all fine, the question is whether that centre was chosen consciously or arrived at by default. Is everyone aware of this or is there a gap between people’s perceptions and what is actually happening. Is it still serving the purpose the organisation was built around.
Reflection 03
If purpose were genuinely guiding your decisions — not aspirationally but structurally — what would have to change?
This is the hardest question; it asks you to look not at intentions but at architecture. Not at what you believe, but at what the system would need to look like for those beliefs to show up consistently in how decisions get made. The answer is usually more structural than most leaders expect.
Why this matters
The decision to take the contract may have been unavoidable. The drift that followed, the way survival logic gradually displaced purpose logic without ever being examined or named, was not. The ripple effect of how complex systems operate and how one decision has far-reaching consequences, was never fully unpacked.
That distinction, between a difficult trade-off made consciously and the quiet accumulation of decisions that were never examined is at the heart of what regenerative leadership operating in a complex system addresses. Not the elimination of hard choices but the development of clarity and structural commitment to keep purpose genuinely present. For the unavoidable decisions, genuine clarity of what is being traded away and a commitment to re-purpose after the event.
That is the work. And it begins with the questions above.
Aandra works with a select number of founders, CEOs, and senior leaders each year supporting them and their businesses to lead in a better way.
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→ Read next: Burnout isn’t a personal failure — it’s a systems problem
The methodology, framework, and personal accounts in this piece are my own. AI tools were used to support the writing and editing process.