Making Purpose Actionable with Principles

One of the major ways Purpose fails organizations is that most of the decisions determining whether it becomes real are made by people who had absolutely nothing to do with identifying or establishing it.

A front desk agent decides where to send a guest who asks where to eat. A line cook decides whether the third item on a ticket goes out now or waits. A PM notices scope creep and decides whether to raise it today or wait until there’s enough evidence to make the argument easier. These decisions rarely get escalated. There isn’t time, people don’t think they warrant escalation, or nobody wants to look inept by asking a manager what to do. So the decision gets made. Then another one gets made. Hundreds or thousands of times across an organization every day, people make small decisions without leadership standing there to interpret the company’s Purpose for them.

This doesn’t make Purpose useless. It means brands are asking Purpose to do a job without giving it the infrastructure required to do that job. They’ve identified why the organization exists, maybe even articulated it beautifully, but they haven’t activated it throughout the organization.

Purpose establishes why a company exists and the direction it intends to travel. It should be durable enough to survive changes in leadership, products, campaigns and market conditions. That durability is precisely what makes Purpose valuable, but it’s also what makes it too broad to answer the hundreds of little questions that come up during the course of normal work. “Why do we exist?” and “What should I do right now?” are related questions, but they aren’t the same question.

There needs to be something between Purpose and daily operations. That’s where principles belong. Purpose tells people where we’re going. Principles give them a mechanism for making sure what they do every day moves us in that direction.

A principle isn’t an adjective. Integrity, honesty and respect may describe the kind of people you want working for you, but they don’t provide much instruction. When someone is staring at two perfectly reasonable choices, “integrity” doesn’t usually tell them which one to choose. Of course you want people to have integrity. So does every other organization on Earth. That doesn’t make it an operating principle.

Principles aren’t personality traits either. Fun, engaging, bold, irreverent, warm. Those belong in the Personality layer of the brand, where they shape language, design, service style and the overall character of the experience. Personality tells us how the brand expresses itself. Principles help people decide what to do.

At 3Owl, for instance, one of ours is Throw solutions before stones. Another is Keep your nerdy glasses rose colored. “Throw solutions before stones” works because it contains an instruction. You can absolutely point out what’s broken, but you’re expected to bring some thinking about how it might be fixed. That changes a standup. It changes a client meeting. It changes what somebody types into Slack late at night when something has gone sideways.

We aren’t asking people to “be positive.” In fact, sometimes the most useful thing a person can do is point out that something is screwed up. The principle tells them how we expect them to behave when they do it. Criticism comes with some responsibility for helping solve the problem.

The biggest difference is Purpose can describe what an organization believes for twenty years. A principle has to be useful Tuesday morning.

I think you get three. Once you have seven, eight or twelve principles, you’ve made them practically impossible to remember. People might read them during onboarding. Someone will put them on a slide at the annual meeting. HR may even turn them into a poster. But six months later, when someone has thirty seconds to make a difficult decision, they aren’t mentally scrolling through principle number seven.

Three forces prioritization. If you only get three, you can’t turn every admirable quality into a principle. You have to decide which behaviors are actually essential to fulfilling the Purpose. It forces leadership to separate the things that would be nice from the things the organization genuinely needs people to do.

More importantly, three is usable. Someone can remember three things while doing their job. That matters because this work doesn’t live in the brand book. It lives in the decisions people make when nobody is there to tell them what to do.

The goal isn’t to comprehensively describe your culture. It’s to equip the culture to act.

I use three tests to determine whether something deserves to be called a principle.

The first is whether it overrides a default.

Every organization develops default behaviors. Some come from the industry. Some come from incentives. Others develop simply because they’re easier when people are busy. A useful principle recognizes one of those defaults and deliberately replaces it with a behavior that better serves the Purpose.

Without “throw solutions before stones,” criticism is the easier default. Finding a flaw requires considerably less effort than figuring out what to do about it. Criticism can also make the critic look smart without requiring them to put an idea of their own at risk. Our principle changes that expectation. Critique is welcome, but it comes with responsibility.

The well-known Ritz-Carlton example works for much the same reason. Employees have historically been empowered to spend up to $2,000 per guest to solve a problem without seeking managerial approval. People tend to get hung up on the $2,000, but I think the more important part is the lack of permission required.

The default inside most service organizations is escalation. Something unusual happens, so you find a manager. The Ritz-Carlton approach interrupts that reflex by giving the employee permission to solve the guest’s problem immediately. The number establishes the boundary, but the behavior is the point.

The second test is whether following the principle requires something of you.

This is where cost matters, although cost doesn’t necessarily mean money. A principle might cost time, convenience, margin, speed, an opportunity, a client, a menu item everybody loved or the ability to avoid an uncomfortable conversation.

If a principle only applies when following it is convenient, it isn’t guiding much of anything. It’s describing what the company prefers to do when nothing important is at stake. The sacrifice is what proves the principle has enough authority to change a decision.

The third test is whether you can actually see it happening.

A principle should produce observable behavior. You should be able to look at real work and determine whether people are using it. I’m less interested in whether employees report that they “feel aligned” with the Purpose or whether leadership believes the culture is strong. What did people actually do differently because this principle existed?

The famous Nordstrom tire-return story is useful here, even though it has become part corporate folklore. A customer supposedly brought tires to a Nordstrom store asking for a refund despite Nordstrom not selling tires. The employee accepted the return. Whether every retelling has grown a little taller over the decades is less interesting to me than why the story survived: it makes the principle tangible. Nordstrom’s reputation for extraordinary discretion in serving the customer becomes understandable through a specific employee decision.

There’s no lengthy debate about customer centricity. No paragraph explaining what service excellence means. The employee knows which direction to lean when the unusual situation arrives.

The easiest way to write principles is to stop asking, “What do we believe?” You already answered that question when you established the Purpose. Asking it again is how you end up with integrity, excellence, passion and all the other words slowly dying on conference room walls across America.

Instead, ask a harder question: If we actually meant this Purpose, what would people have to do differently?

Take Hotel Indigo’s stated Purpose: to illuminate the stories of the neighborhoods we inhabit.

What does that require of someone working the front desk?

One possible principle might be Send them out the door. When a guest asks where to eat, drink or explore, the first recommendation should be a specific place outside the hotel. Not “there are some good restaurants nearby.” Give them a name. Tell them what to order. Tell them who owns it or why it matters.

Now the Purpose has entered an actual guest interaction. It can also be observed. Sample front desk conversations and see how frequently employees provide a specific neighborhood recommendation rather than keeping the guest on property or reaching for the safest tourist answer.

Another principle might be Name the street, not the city. If you claim to illuminate neighborhoods, generic city language isn’t enough. Copy, programming, signage and staff recommendations should operate at the level of streets, blocks, landmarks and people. Suddenly marketing has something it can use while writing a landing page, operations has something to use while planning an event, and the front desk has something to use when talking to a guest.

A third might be Ask the block before you ask the brand. Before a property makes a meaningful programming, menu or design decision, involve somebody local. Talk to the business owner, artist, chef, historian or neighbor before reaching for the global brand template.

Now we’ve taken one sentence about illuminating neighborhoods and turned it into three behaviors people across very different functions could actually use.

Consider Patagonia’s Purpose: We’re in business to save our home planet.

A principle derived from it might be Fix it before you sell it. When something can reasonably be repaired, repair becomes the first option. An employee standing in front of a customer now has guidance for a real commercial decision, and following that guidance may mean sacrificing a sale.

Another could be Name the enemy. If the company believes a particular behavior, industry practice or material is causing environmental harm, say so rather than disappearing into the vague language of sustainability.

A third might be Publish the ugly number. When you make an environmental claim, disclose the number that makes you look least flattering on the same subject. That creates a very different standard for transparency than publishing a sustainability report filled exclusively with improvements.

I’m not suggesting these are or should be Patagonia’s actual operating principles. That’s not the point. The exercise is to take the Purpose seriously enough to ask what somebody would have to do because it exists.

Now take the burrito brand I’ve used in my book, with the Purpose to make my family’s food and flavors accessible and convenient so no one goes hungry.

If “accessible” actually means something, a principle might be Price the third visit. Instead of evaluating every menu decision around maximum check average, ask whether a guest could reasonably afford to eat there several times a week. Now accessibility has consequences for pricing strategy rather than remaining a nice word in the Purpose statement.

If “no one goes hungry” actually means something, try Feed first, sort it after. Someone who can’t pay can be fed without an employee finding a manager and asking permission. The lofty statement about hunger has become a decision an eighteen-year-old team member can make during a lunch rush.

And if “convenient” means something, Two minutes or it doesn’t ship. Ticket time becomes a constraint on menu development. A menu item that consistently wrecks throughput doesn’t get protected simply because everybody in the test kitchen loves it.

Three principles producing three kinds of decisions. That’s how Purpose begins to show up in a restaurant when the founder isn’t standing there.

Once principles are genuinely actionable, measurement gets surprisingly straightforward. You don’t need an employee survey asking whether everyone “feels connected to the Purpose.” Look at the work.

How often did the hotel send someone to a neighborhood business? How many products were repaired instead of replaced? How many menu ideas were rejected because they violated the ticket-time threshold? How many project problems arrived with a proposed solution attached?

I’d resist the urge to turn this into another enormous dashboard. Sampling may tell you more. Review thirty interactions. Audit a handful of projects. Pull a month of operational decisions and look for evidence that the principle influenced what happened.

The question you’re trying to answer is simply whether people are using the principles to make decisions.

There’s another question I think belongs in every quarterly review: What decision changed because of one of our principles?

If everyone stares at the table trying to remember one, that’s useful information. Maybe the principle is poorly written. Maybe nobody understands it. Maybe leadership keeps overriding it. Or maybe it never deserved to be a principle in the first place.

Whatever the reason, you’ve discovered the gap between what the organization says and what it does.

If you want to make Purpose actionable, I wouldn’t start by locking twelve executives in a conference room and asking them to invent three clever phrases. Start with decisions the organization has already made.

Find one your team got wrong during the last month. It doesn’t need to be catastrophic. In fact, the ordinary ones are probably more useful. Find a call that came out sideways and ask what default behavior produced it. Then ask what short instruction, understood by everyone involved, could have changed that decision while it was still being made.

Do it again with another decision, and then another. Patterns will start to emerge because organizations tend to make different versions of the same mistakes. Those patterns point toward the behaviors that need governing, and those behaviors become candidates for principles.

Then take those candidates back to the Purpose and ask the question that matters: If everyone followed these principles every day, would our Purpose become more true?

Purpose was never supposed to just live on a wall, in a deck or at the beginning of an employee handbook. It has to make its way through the organization until the Patron can actually feel the difference. Principles are how that happens.