Are you sure about your aim?

If decision-making is hard, check the foundation

From time to time, it makes sense to review our aim. Things change over the months and years, and aims should ideally describe the circle and its activities.

If circle members aren’t aligned on their aim, they often struggle in indirect ways.

  • People’s opinions diverge a lot because they have different interpretations of the aim.
  • Some questions are unanswerable because of an inherent mismatch.
  • Your circle’s decisions are always dependent on another circle because the aims aren’t divided up well.

A good way to evaluate the aim is to look at decisions made and at operational roles in the circle to see how aligned there are. Does the aim describe what you’re doing, and are all the (high-level) activities covered by the aim? Some more questions:

  • Is the aim still relevant? Has it morphed a little over time?
  • The organization’s priorities might have changed - is this circle still necessary given everything else?
  • Is everyone’s interpretation of the aim the same?
  • Is there something that lives in another circle that should be moved here?
  • Are you really acting on all the relevant aspects of the aim?

If not, put it on the backlog and come up with a new aim proposal, or do a deeper soul searching session where everyone shares how they understand the aim. If you end up changing the aim, remember to run it by your parent circle as well to make sure all the parts of the organization stay coherent.

This lesson has sunk in for me big time… Defining a clear aim is so important! Especially when your organization is navigating into new waters. The aim really is the ships’ rudder. Thanks for this !

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