So many organizations out there confuse their mission with their methods, holding on to “how” they do things as closely as they cling to “why” they do them in the first place. At Heroik, I work with a lot of mission-led organizations and nonprofits and notice that many are clinging to outdated practices and methods, and reluctant to keep up with the pace of society. Their attachment and comfort to methods, is jeopardizing their mission in many cases.
If you work for a mission-led org, I’ve probably raised your blood pressure. Good. Let’s talk about it.
At Heroik, since its founding, we’ve been in pursuit of sustainable high performance, holistically, From day one we’ve had this mantra: Mission Ready for Life. That doesn’t mean we marry our methods. It means we stay fit for the mission, no matter what form it takes, no matter how the tools or terrain evolve. Methods change, training and retooling are the response to the only constant felt in the Digital Age: change. Change is certain, methods are not, and Missions endure.
But so many nonprofits fall into a trap of letting the method become the mission. When you can’t tell the difference between your reason for existing and how you deliver on that mission, you’re building a foundation of fragility, especially in the Digital Age.
A Career Built on Change, Grounded in Mission
I chose to work in tech and new media. I’m a writer and artist at heart first, geek second. But even as individuals we must adapt to our times. If your work involves communicating with others, then like it or not you’re in the media business, the experience design business, and the tech industry. And this choice guarantees that change will be a constant friend or foe, depending on how prepared you are.
Being Mission Ready For Life means building evergreen habits: to train, learn, watch, listen, elevate, execute, build, connect, grow, deliver and repeat. You, and your organization, adapt and evolve over time because the environment changes, but the mission is still relevant and needs to stay true. Too many nonprofits have either forgotten that, or assume that people will stay with them as if equally dedicated to the cause.
Addicted to Method
Ask a nonprofit executive director what their mission is and watch how often they respond with a method.
“We’re a soup kitchen…”
“We sell MP3’s at a slight markup to end…”
“We’re a newspaper for…”No. Those are all methods. We’re a [METHOD] that does [THE MISSION]. The problem with this language is that people root the entire identity in the method, not the mission.
This isn’t just in nonprofits either. Startups make this mistake and it is a deathknell as well. They position the identity and purpose of the company on the method used. They create a brand that is narrowly dependent on the method. The problem is the same as it is with nonprofits, just in tech it happens faster. When the method becomes irrelevant because things change, you’re basically out of business…eventually… after bouts of denial… we’ll get to that.
Your mission is why you exist, not how you operate. And if your mission is strong, and you are truly committed to it, you should be willing to let go of methods that don’t work or no longer serve the mission, and adopt methods that do, because the Mission is more important than a method based identity.
Methods get old and outdated. Printed Newspapers I am looking at you. Methods break and lose traction and relevance. Failure is not really a requirement for the method to no longer serve. Stuff happens. But if you’re committed to the method over the Mission, you either are already distorting or will distort the mission to justify keeping your favorite tools and toys alive – organizational malpractice – and this is a tough love invitation to stop doing it.
Value is About Delivering For People
Here’s the simplest, most sustainable definition of value I’ve ever used: advancing the condition of others. That’s it. Not printing the most pamphlets. Not increasing Facebook followers. Not scaling faster than the competition.
As books like How to Win Friends and Influence People (Carnegie), AntiFragile (Taleb) and The Lean Startup (Ries), Traction ( Wickman) all point out, the instant you lose sight of what delivering value is, the quality erodes, risks and dangers multiply, and in what feels like an instant, you’re on a crash course trajectory.
Everyone is in the business of creating and delivering value to someone else; customer or beneficiary, or cause. Even if it is a cause, it is a cause as measured, as perceived by some group of people. Language exists for people to determine meaning and use it. Creating and delivering value requires that at all times that you are others minded, and forever people minded. I’ve never seen an organization for profit or nonprofit, that’s not in the people business.
Most organizations, especially in tech, but also anything or anyone who needs to touch media for outreach and communications, (so everyone), tends to prioritize things like winning the customer, or scaling, over consistently delivering value as promised.
Advancing the condition of others. If you’re doing that, then you are on mission. If you’re doing anything else, measuring by everything else, you’re off course.
Here’s an adaptation mistake that many nonprofits make – they mimic how business is adapting to all this change. The problem is, many of these methods are not designed or focused on delivering on the mission or creating value. They are focused more on acting like it, looking the part vs. being the part, prioritizing reach over resonance, output over outcome, and making noise over traction. In the business world, this involves championing vanity metrics and convincing yourself to believe that as long as more people are seeing what they do (or the chart says that at least), it must be valuable. WRONG.
This is how you lose integrity in the process of adapting. And we need to offer a better definition of integrity to avoid confusing performance art with performance. Here’s the Heroik definition of integrity: consistency in word and deed especially when no one is watching.
It doesn’t matter if you’re for profit, nonprofit, working on process, method, or mission. If your backend delivery doesn’t match your front-end promise, you are out of integrity. If you’re avoiding the strongest metrics to indicate value delivery, because the vanity metrics tell/sell a better story to YOURSELF, you are out of alignment.
If for example you’re more concerned with awareness – how many people hear you than how many people grow from you, it’s time to re-align your process, methods and metrics closer to your mission.
How did we drift so far away from our mission?
As the whole world, global markets, and every organization tries to navigate change, there is a massive market to help us compensate, lie to ourselves and others that we don’t need to change, everything is fine, or to cleverly shift to easy yet near-meaningless or hollow metrics.
Charts, decks, hype, obfuscation and artificial markets for momentum and growth.
There is a multi-billion, if not trillion dollar counterfeit BS buffet to pick from, deployed in every pitch deck, brand narrative.
Academics, finance geeks and MBAs are cashing in too, pontificating with theoretical models on achieving scale at all costs, by any means (broad strokes), and avoiding focused discussion on delivery on promise and mission. Then they act surprised and confused at what happens when we take our eyes off the ball, supplant mission alignment with vanity metrics that reinforce our preferred methods and it leads to compromising the alignment to the mission and quality of value delivery. And then they use a bunch of 5 dollar words to blame someone or something else. Meanwhile the mission is underserved, the donors disappear, and employees disengage.
Culture Isn’t a Luxury
The finance geeks and chart slingers roll their eyes at mission, vision, values, and culture. They struggle to model it in Excel, so because the math is hard for them, they write it off. But culture is what holds the mission steady when the methods have to flex or change.
And in the nonprofit world, where the margins are thin, culture is the system. Without it you lose the people, the volunteers, the donors, the underpaid employees. The culture aligned to mission is at the core of the organization’s strategy and advantages that come with it (hearts and minds over raw economic forces). And the moment you replace mission with method, you start optimizing for method over. You design systems and metrics to feed the machine, not the mission. This structure calcifies and adaptability diminishes, and as the validity and relevance of your methods start to wane, your people become the mechanics for an engine no longer worth running. And now you’ve poisoned your culture because the people are now invested more in upholding the method, steeped in all the metrics that aren’t tightly aligned to the mission.
On the other hand, there is hope. When you preserve the mission and treat the method like a tool, the culture remains more agile and aligned. The team knows the difference between what we do and why we do it. That gives you leverage. That makes you more resilient come what may.
The Real Compass For Mission Alignment is People
All value is digested through a human lens. Not algorithms. Not vanity metrics. Not proxy indicators. People. No matter how sophisticated or complex the systems through which it all travels, it is all perceived, and meaning derived by people.
So why would you build a strategy that removes you from the people you serve? Why would you design your systems to create distance instead of connection? Choose metrics that stay as close to the mission, as close to the people with the most skin in the game on the receiving end, to your disadvantage, centric to their interests and perceptions, not because they are the end-all, but because this will keep you on your toes, in tight alignment with your mission, in constant pursuit of excellence and ahead of everyone else who chases methods and vanity metrics over mission alignment.
Most of the methods and tools that are sold as best practices are most often abstractions that create intentional distance from the metrics that matter the most, those closest to your mission, your why.
That’s the problem with abstraction. When your method becomes more important than the mission, your compass starts drifting. A few degrees off to travel a short distance is fine. But over time? You’ll end up miles from where you’re supposed to end up, and you won’t even realize it until it’s too late.
This is why user-centric strategies, and human-centered design matter so much. Not as a buzzwords, but as grounding principles. It’s a commitment to staying close to the ones who define your impact. A decision to speak the vernacular of the people you serve. To build around their needs. To adjust when they adjust.
Language as Infrastructure
Language is a social technology. It’s critical to how we align, decide, connect and lead. And in the nonprofit space, your language determines your traction. Whether you’re writing an annual report, a call to action, or a donor email, you are either speaking the language of the mission or the dialect of the method. Be sure to keep the priorities straight.
Here’s a bet I’ll keep making: the language you use will reveal the path you’re on. Language that sounds institutional, academic or fresh out of the Business Review, is the most common way to hide bloat, obfuscation, and a great deal of distance from mission. This is because it’s harder to discern what is actually good from what sounds good. When using plain language, BS is easier to detect.
At the end of the day, there are probably more people who speak plain language, than math and code. So it’s important to know when and how to break it down, or build it up, and check your language for mission alignment. People still lead people. Language shapes our ideas, our thought process, our values, our culture, our society and thus how we execute and deliver. Language is programmatic. And that means language matters.
Know the 5 Signs of Mission Drift
Nonprofits that confuse mission with method display 5 telltale signs:
- They protect the tools more than the outcomes
- They scale delivery without improving results
- They pursue acquisition instead of transformation
- They obsess over reach but ignore retention
- They prioritize internal convenience over external impact
If any of that feels familiar, it’s time to stop, recalibrate, re-align and revisit the mission.
Here’s the acid test: If your current model vanished tomorrow, would your team still know how to serve the mission?
If the answer is no, you’re not Mission Ready For Life. You’re method-dependent, and that’s a dangerous place to be.
Back to Basics: A Heroik Perspective
We intentionally built Heroik to be industry and business agnostic. It can live in any form, as long as the core is solid: build good things that move people forward. It doesn’t matter what form that takes – whether that’s consulting, media, apparel, an outdoor brand, or some future tech stack, it doesn’t matter. What matters is: are we advancing the condition of others? Are we upholding the culture that gives us the performative differentiators to allow that to happen? That filter never goes away.
It’s why we talk about BYOX – Being, Bringing and Becoming Your Own X Factor. There will be times when you will have to rise above not just noise, but all the so-called best-practices. You need a CAPE: Character Aligned with Purpose and Energy. Because if you don’t have all four components working together, you’ll crumble under pressure, trying to play the game the same way everyone else does, not knowing, they too are sprinting off of a cliff. Have CAPE will travel.
It’s why we say Bring Your Own Bravery (BYOB). Because there will be moments when the answers aren’t obvious, and you have to stand in the gap.
And it’s why I bet on timeless disciplines. Because if you want to respond to change well, you need habits that endure. The flashy stuff doesn’t sustain – so it’s important to know when to adopt, adapt, and when to let go.
Mission First. Always.
So if you’re a nonprofit leader reading this, let me offer a hard reset:
- Your mission is why you exist.Your method is how you fulfill it.
- Don’t confuse the two. Don’t let the method hijack the mission.
Stay close to the people at the finish line, at the other end of your mission. Stay obsessed with delivering value as you promise and reconcile through how they experience it. Stay ready to evolve the method, but never dilute the mission. And most importantly, build an organization and a culture that is truly Mission Ready for Life.
Because when the tools change, when the market shifts, when the funding dries up, or the platform gets pulled, the thing that will carry you forward is the one thing that doesn’t break under pressure: mission. Not as a bumper sticker. Not as a slide in the deck. But as the north star you organize your life and leadership around.
Hold that line. Methods will come and go. The mission must endure. Get after it!
