When purpose fades: why addressing the primary risk matters

Organisations often pride themselves on being clear about their purpose, seeing it as a guiding principle for what they do. But it’s not unusual for this sense of purpose to drift, especially when times are tough. Financial pressures build, new leadership arrives, or external demands change, and suddenly, the purpose that once brought everyone together starts to fade into the background.

This might seem like a practical problem of strategy or resources. But as Larry Hirschhorn suggests in his 1999 paper The Primary Risk, it often runs much deeper. Hirschhorn talks about the primary risk—the anxiety and uncertainty that bubble up when organisations have to juggle competing priorities. He shows how this can disrupt the balance between what an organisation focuses on and what it sidelines.

To explain this, Hirschhorn borrows the idea of figure and ground from Gestalt psychology. Imagine a photo: the “figure” is what grabs your attention, while the “ground” is the backdrop that gives it meaning. In organisations, the figure should be the central purpose—the thing they’re striving to achieve. The ground is everything else that supports it: tasks, systems, and structures that help the organisation function. The relationship between figure and ground isn’t fixed; it needs to shift depending on what’s happening. The trouble starts when this balance gets stuck or, worse, when the ground is pushed aside entirely.

This article looks at how this played out in a UK charity I worked with. By focusing too much on one set of priorities and ignoring others, the organisation ended up losing its way.

A charity in transition

The charity, founded over a century ago, had long worked to tackle poverty and social exclusion. In recent years, it mainly served working-class communities, many with Bangladeshi heritage.

When I spoke to the new leadership team, it was striking how little they talked about the client group unless prompted. And when the group did come up, it was in vague, abstract terms, or as an afterthought to the organisation’s financial concerns. One moment really stuck with me: a gold-coloured cycle rickshaw, likely from Bangladesh and symbolic of the community’s heritage, had been repurposed as a doorstop. For me, this summed up what was happening—something meaningful reduced to mere functionality, much like the way the client group had been treated.

The leadership had shifted its attention to income generation. Renting out workspace, chasing corporate sponsorships, and upgrading IT systems were the new focus. This was seen as essential to paying off debt, modernising, and making the organisation financially stable. In their eyes, financial sustainability was the primary risk the organisation faced. Following Hirschhorn’s framework, income generation became the figure—the centre of attention—while the needs of the client group faded into the ground.

Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes organisations need to shift priorities for a while to survive or grow. But here, it felt as though serving the client group—the charity’s core purpose—wasn’t just deprioritised; it was actively suppressed. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was partly because leadership found it easier to focus on generating income, a task they felt they understood, than to engage with the complexities of meeting the client group’s needs.

The weight of ambivalence

For not-for-profit organisations, defining a central purpose can be tricky. They’re not simply serving customers or chasing profit; they’re often working with vulnerable or marginalised groups. This can make the work emotionally charged and complicated. As a result, staff might unconsciously focus on meeting their own needs—like feeling competent or in control—rather than those of the people they’re meant to serve.

In this charity, the leadership seemed to struggle with curiosity about their clients. This wasn’t because they didn’t care, but because they lacked a clear purpose that could help them process the feelings of guilt and shame they seemed to carry. These emotions likely stemmed from their position of power and privilege compared to the client group.

The weight of history played a part too. Many of the community members the charity served were descendants of migrants from lands once colonised and exploited by Britain. The leadership may have felt overwhelmed by the responsibility of addressing such deep-rooted inequalities. In some ways, the charity’s work could be seen as continuing a colonial dynamic: offering small-scale support without tackling the larger structural issues, thus perpetuating the inequalities they sought to address. This unacknowledged tension left the organisation paralysed, with its core purpose stuck in the background.

Consulting to the primary risk

Addressing the primary risk is about more than fixing surface-level problems; it’s about understanding and working with the emotional and relational dynamics that underpin them. Here’s how it can be approached:

1. Verbalising and interpreting the figure/ground relationship: the first step is to help the organisation see which task has become the figure and which has been pushed into the ground. This makes the dynamic explicit and opens up a conversation about what’s being neglected and why.

2. Surfacing and interpreting ambivalent feelings: tasks relegated to the background often bring up mixed emotions—frustration, guilt, or anxiety. These feelings can lead to avoidance or defensiveness. Consulting involves creating a space where these emotions can be acknowledged and worked through.

3. Clarifying how ambivalence undermines the foreground task: ignoring the background task doesn’t just harm that task—it also affects the work in the foreground. For example, unresolved feelings about neglected client needs can distract from or destabilise financial decision-making. Helping organisations see these connections is key.

4. Letting go of antipathy towards the background task: often, the background task is seen as a burden or a threat. The goal here is to reframe it as an essential support for the foreground task, so it can be approached with more openness and less resistance.

5. Rebuilding a dynamic figure/ground relationship: finally, the organisation needs to find a new balance between figure and ground, one that fits its current context. This involves making space for both tasks to be valued and attended to as needed, without losing sight of the overall purpose.