Working on Purpose and Culture as an Ecosystem

Jan 3

At the Purpose-Driven Academy, we treat purpose and culture as an ecosystem made of tools that interact, reinforce each other, and create continuity.

At its core are three web-based applications, released under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license. They are open by design because purpose and culture don’t improve through ownership or control, but through use, testing, and shared reflection.

Each app plays a specific role in a three-step journey.

Exploration comes first.
PurposeExplorer works as a serious game to create movement. It does not aim at answers, but at reactions. It surfaces assumptions, tensions, and implicit meanings that usually remain unspoken. Its value lies in starting conversations that matter, quickly and without ceremony.
Structure comes next.
Codify Your Purpose turns exploration into something usable. It helps individuals and teams move from intuition to clarity by articulating purpose as a shared reference.
Verification closes the loop.
The Purpose-Driven Culture Assessment shifts attention from intentions to reality. It does not assess people, but organizational coherence. It looks at how purpose actually shows up in everyday behaviours and practices, revealing alignment or misalignment without judgement.

Around these applications, other resources complete the system.

The book Codify Your Purpose focuses on individual purpose, offering an iterative process to clarify personal direction and responsibility.
The Pictorial Atlas of 101 Purpose Statements from Around the World provides a different contribution: it shows how purpose takes form in real organizations, across industries and countries, making patterns visible through examples.
The Purpose-Driven Business Canvas connects everything back to action. As a visual thinking tool, it helps leadership teams bring purpose, strategy, and culture into the same conversation, turning abstract alignment into concrete choices.

None of these elements is meant to work alone.

Together, they form the ecosystem we designed to support disciplined work on purpose and culture—work that unfolds over time, through practice rather than declarations.

At the beginning of a new year, this perspective matters because it offers a consistent way to work on what organizations claim to stand for.

Clarity, in this sense, is not an outcome but a practice.