Businesses today are at a crossroads. For a long time, the orienting goal has been to maximise profits and shareholder value, often at the expense of people and the planet. Yet, as the world grapples with climate change, inequality, and other global challenges, society is demanding more from businesses. Organisations that continue with business as usual risk irrelevance. Increasingly, companies recognise the need to shift from this narrow focus towards a new model—one that creates value for a broader range of stakeholders and actively addresses the pressing issues of people and the planet. We call this model a purpose-led business¹.
Changing the way business operates is a systems issue². As any change manager will tell you, change is inherently difficult. It is challenging enough at the individual level, even more so at the organisational level, and can seem almost insurmountable at the system level. Transforming business to serve both people and the planet isn’t just a matter of tweaking strategies; it’s about rethinking the very role of business in society. Systems change involves challenging entrenched ways of thinking and operating, and creating a paradigm shift in how value is defined and delivered. The change is already happening around the world, and while it is exciting, the problems that businesses are trying to solve are vast and intimidating—too big for any one organisation, let alone individual sustainability or purpose leaders, to tackle alone.
Catalysing systems change through community
That’s why we partnered with the Purpose in Practice Community (PIPC), founded by NatWest and Blueprint for Better Business. PIPC brings together senior leaders and changemakers from across sectors to explore how businesses can integrate people and planet at the heart of their success and to drive the systemic transformation required.
At its core, systems change is about shifting the underlying structures and mindsets that govern how we operate as individuals, organisations, societies and so on. It requires moving beyond isolated efforts and building collective momentum across industries. This is the goal of the Purpose in Practice Community: to accelerate the transition to purpose-led business by connecting individuals from diverse roles and sectors who are committed to driving this change.
The challenges we face—whether environmental degradation, social inequality, or economic instability—are big, hard, and scary. No single organisation can solve these problems on its own. The power of PIPC lies in bringing people together to share, learn, and collaborate, creating a space for leaders to step outside their day-to-day responsibilities and collectively imagine a different future.
PIPC operates through a series of labs, each focused on a critical question for advancing purpose-led business. Over the past year, Clarasys has had the opportunity to design and facilitate a lab focused on integrating purpose into business strategy and performance. Together with our fellow Lab leads Anglian Water and Ofcom, we’ve convened organisations from industries like retail, finance, and transport to explore how we can turn purpose into practice and embed it into the core of organisational strategy.
Lessons in driving systems change
Through our work with PIPC, we have identified three key lessons that are important for driving systems change within and across businesses:
- Build trusting relationships
It can be scary to talk about a fundamental shift in the way we do business, especially if you are part of a business that is firmly rooted in the current system. Leaders may hesitate to openly discuss the barriers they face or to collaborate with peers—some of whom may be competitors. That is why trust is so important. Trust is the foundation of systems change because it enables leaders to challenge the status quo, experiment with new approaches, and collaborate in ways that would not be possible in a competitive, low-trust environment.
To foster trust, we could build on the environment created by Blueprint for Better Business and earlier PIPC Labs which created strong relationships between participants and set the tone on open and safe communication. With Lab 3, we welcomed new and existing people, forging new relationships. Operating under Chatham House rules, we focused on creating psychological safety through guiding principles of non-judgementalism, curiosity, and openness. This allowed participants to be honest about the difficulties of becoming purpose-led, from internal roadblocks to personal experiences of failure.
- Use play to challenge assumptions and unlock creativity
Challenging deep-rooted assumptions is central to systems change. Often, we find ourselves stuck in entrenched ways of thinking that prevent innovation. In the PIPC lab, we found that playful exercises were a powerful tool for breaking down these mental barriers. By engaging in creative, outside-the-box activities, participants were able to explore new ideas and approaches more freely.
One such exercise was a game we developed called Purpose Pursuit, where teams of senior leaders had to develop a purpose-led strategy for a fictional company, navigating scenarios that mirrored real-life business pressures. The game helped participants think beyond their usual frameworks and sparked innovative solutions that balanced the needs of people, planet, and profit. Play encouraged collaboration and helped participants see the bigger picture—an essential component of systems change.
- Harness storytelling to drive meaningful change
Traditional business strategy often focuses on data and financial metrics to demonstrate success, but systems change requires a different approach. Not everything that counts can be measured, and not everything that can be measured should count. We found that the process of creating a purpose-led strategy (more on that in this article), results in better relationships between people impacted by the strategy, such as employees, customers, and communities. This is difficult to measure as it is a byproduct and has not necessarily occurred by design. On the other hand, we could measure the number of people we engaged when creating the strategy but this wouldn’t tell us much about the quality of relationships.
In our lab, we found that storytelling was a powerful way to convey the complexity and human impact of purpose-led business. People shared real-life stories about creating strategy, revealing their successes, failures, and vulnerabilities, which helped to break down barriers and create a more inclusive and supportive environment. This openness was crucial for challenging existing mindsets and practices, allowing participants to explore new perspectives and collaboratively develop innovative solutions for systemic change.
Looking forward
Facilitating a lab within the Purpose in Practice Community has been a valuable experience for Clarasys, both as an organisation and for us as individuals. We are committed to continuing our work with this community and expanding our insights into how purpose-led business can drive systems change. This is just the beginning, and we are excited to see how the movement evolves.
If you’re interested in joining PIPC, you can read more about it here. And if you’d like to talk to our Purpose & Impact experts about how you can embed purpose at the heart of your organisation please get in touch.
References
- Professor Colin Mayer defines the role of purpose-led business to ‘create profitable solutions to the problems of people and planet, while not profiting from creating problems for either.’
- The way business operates is a complex system. Complex systems are systems composed of many elements that interact with each other, which makes them extremely rich dynamical systems showing a huge range of phenomena. For a deepdive on the theory behind complex systems, look at the book Introduction to the Theory of Complex Systems.