Stage 3: Draft and refine your ‘Why’ statement
The last stage of discovering your ‘Why’ is to agree and refine it. This focuses on thinking about the contribution that is required to enable all within an organisation (internal or external) to succeed.
Discovery
Review how to support the mission:
- How does your team and you as an individual, add value?
- What can you solve, deliver, contribute?
- What are your strengths as a team and individual?
- How do you measure success?
- What is the impact of what you do, both for students, staff and the organisation?
- What is the emotional impact of what you do, both for students, staff and the organisation?
What has changed from Stage 1 to Stage 3?
- Who is in your story now?
- What might change for the people in your story as a result of the actions of your team?
- How might it effect the people in the story, or those who witnessed it?
- What can you do differently?
Ensure that these are captured as short contribution statements, to be able to refer back to for reporting out Stage 3.
Review and discuss the outputs:
- How do participants feel?
- What has been the impact on them?
- What else do they want to know?
- What else do they want to share?
- Is this what they expected?
Reporting out Stage 3
Then look at the outputs from the gathering stage and ask the group to adopt a signal phrase to encapsulate the impact and produce impact statements.
Draft the ‘Why’ statement
The stories from Stage 1 help to maintain the meaning behind the action and impact statements. Your ‘Why’ statement draft is normally linked to one or two stories from Stage 1.
- Select the action statements and map them to the impact statements and choose one or two that you feel strong align to the ‘mission’ and then craft the most inspiring draft ‘Why’ statement.
- Then review the ‘Why’ statement as a group and define it further if required.
- This should enable you to produce your key outcome for the workshop – your draft ‘Why’.
The last part of Stage 3 is to consider your action statements again, based on your draft ‘Why’ statement and produce context statements. These help you to refocus on the context of your ‘Why’ and how it links to a 'problem' you think you need to solve. Why are you doing it?
An example, would be if you were focusing on an ‘inclusion theme’ you might produce the following context statements:
- Be kind, be curious, be inclusive.
Be open and keen to learning about others, their backgrounds and lived experiences – be curious and interested about people’s differences as there is no such thing as ‘normal’.