# What makes a good organizational mission? # What makes a good organizational mission? # What makes a good organizational mission Organizational missions are a tricky thing. On the one hand, they can be an inspirational rallying point and a powerful action discriminator. On the other hand they can be a distracting pile of words that obscures reality and enables people to feel good about themselves without earning it. It’s unclear whether people focus too much on missions or too little. Most mission statements are bullshit that people spend too much time focusing on at the expense of putting their heads down and letting actions speak for themselves. This phenomena encourages (at least in me) a counter-reaction to eschew thinking and talking about mission entirely - “let’s earn the luxury of thinking about mission through hard work first.” I’m still sympathetic to this view, but at the same time spending spending some cycles on missions is probably worthwhile. [[People use the purpose and mission of an institution as a proxy for what that organization actually does]] so without a mission, it will be hard to succinctly get across a useful mental model of an organization, especially if it’s doing something new with long feedback loops. [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]], so there *is* a mission whether you make it explicit or not. The extremely hard trick is to get all three to be the same. A good mission can also be a powerful discriminator both on actions and on people. You should be able to ask of any action or project “does this fit within the mission?” And be able to come up with a concrete answer that can very well be “no.” Most missions are so nebulous as to arguably cover anything and don’t enable you to rule things *out*. Perhaps controversially, any given mission shouldn’t appeal to everybody. [[Institutions need to differentiate between individuals inside and outside the institution]] and missions that don’t sound good to everybody can help with that. A dangerous temptation is to create a mission that sounds good to everybody. SpaceX and Bell Labs’ missions are good examples. Bell Labs’ mission was to “Support the Bell System with Science and Engineering Advances.” SpaceX’s mission is to “Make humanity an interplanetary species.” Both of them cover a *massive* range of activity, but at the same time there are many activities that do not fit under their umbrellas. Both of them will appeal to some people and completely turn off other people. [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/What+makes+a+good+organizational+mission) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/What+makes+a+good+organizational+mission)