The Geometry of Mission Leadership

Some time ago I discovered a tool for helping some of my colleagues recognize that not all components of the organizational mission are equal or require equal attention. All I had to do was draw a few triangles.

Let me explain. Many organizations don't have the luxury of focusing on a single, one-element mission. Success might require pushing forward in two or even three different directions simultaneously. There may be, and should be, synergies and overlap among the directions. But they can be different enough so that the mission is best defined as being made up of two or three parts. Think of Apple not only producing phones and laptops, but also running an online music distribution service. Think of Ford being not only a car manufacturer, but also a finance company, and now even a ride-sharing company competing with Uber. (And Uber is moving into manufacturing technology for self-driving vehicles that would compete with Ford's offerings.)

Leading an organization with such a "bipartite" or "tripartite" mission can present special challenges. In particular, how can leaders determine the best way to apportion resources and focus to these separate, and sometimes conflicting, mission components? And how do you keep the entire organization feeling as if it's a cohesive whole moving in lockstep if different elements are moving in different directions?

A good example is the academic health system, the sort of institution I've been with my entire career. Academic health systems are essentially, and by definition, charged with a tripartite mission: delivering care to patients, advancing medical knowledge through research, and educating clinicians. No academic health system can thrive while focusing on only one or two of those areas and falling flat in the other. And while the three parts of the mission are interrelated, they each entail very different challenges, resource requirements and management approaches.

But that doesn't mean the different components of the academic health system mission have to be equally emphasized. Sometimes an organization can stand out by focusing more on one of the mission parts than the others, establishing excellence in that area. That excellence can provide a halo for the other parts of the mission, lifting the entire organization, and creating a sharp identity that everyone in the organization can be proud of. At Johns Hopkins Medicine, for example, where I was a long-time senior executive, the institution's fame and prestige was largely built on its outstanding medical research. That success helped drive the quality and reputation of its health system and medical school.

I discovered at Hopkins that when having a conversation about the competing components of the tripartite mission, it was helpful to draw a triangle, with each side of the triangle representing one part of the mission. First I drew it as an equilateral triangle, with each side of equal length, which is how everyone drew it there--it's actually part of the Hopkins Medicine logo. But then next to it I drew an isosceles triangle, with two sides of the same length, and one longer side--the side representing research. Sometimes the conversation would lead to many different variations of that triangle, in an effort to find the ideal representation of the Hopkins mission.

As simplistic as the triangle trick sounds, it provided a metaphor that was often enough to turn the lightbulb on with some managers and professionals there. What's more, changing the relative length of the longer and shorter sides provided a quick visual metaphor for the hypothetical impact of funneling more resources and emphasis to one part of the mission. For many organizations a scalene triangle of three unequal sides would be more appropriate, creating even more opportunity for variation.

It's not exactly a sophisticated management tool. But many managers and other stakeholders need a nudge to make that leap to understanding that asymmetry in mission focus can have its advantages. Whatever bad memories people may have of learning geometry, a simple triangle still holds a lot of power.