Mission Leadership – What does it take to organise for purpose-driven, mission-focused “grand challenges”? This question arose during our research on participative strategy. In this article, we draw on our experience working with large-scale systems change and complex organisational design to illuminate the challenges of implementing Mission Leadership.
The Nature of Grand Challenges
Society is currently grappling with a range of intractable grand challenges[i], including:
- Addressing climate change
- Developing affordable and clean energy
- Securing sustainable agriculture
- Adapting to ageing populations
- Improving physical and mental well-being
These challenges directly impact the quality of life and the future of our planet.
Such challenges have been described as adaptive challenges[ii], wicked problems[iii], or social messes[iv] due to their complexity. They are often difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and ever-changing requirements that are hard to define.
Grand challenges demand collaboration across socio-political, sectoral, and disciplinary boundaries. Transformative change is only possible when innovation occurs across the entire system, not just within its individual parts. This level of change requires the engagement of a wide range of stakeholders.
The Need for New Organisational Models
Our struggle to address grand challenges is partly due to how most organizations are structured. Typically, organisations are designed with:
- Clear accountability
- Specialization
- A competitive mindset
- Defined boundaries of authority.
These characteristics help organizations excel in delivering specific products or services efficiently. However, they tend to promote competition rather than collaboration. Each organization focuses on its specific part of a system, often neglecting the broader interdependencies that affect society and the environment.
Governments and international bodies typically intervene to address these externalities—such as pollution, inequality, or systemic risk—through policies and regulations. However, the complexity of interactions between organizations often limits information flow, and formal processes (like government procurement) can stifle innovation.
The result? We create collective outcomes that no one truly desires.
A Case in Point
Several years ago, we worked with a national health body seeking to redesign its governance model for public health services. The leadership had ambitious public health goals but was heavily reliant on other partners—public, private, and third-sector organizations—to achieve them. However, the system was structured in a way that made collaboration nearly impossible. For example, funding was channeled toward acute healthcare providers, while meaningful change required investments in public health. Conflicting goals led to friction between institutions, eroding trust and hampering information sharing.
In working with complex systems, we frequently find that people recognize what is happening but feel powerless to change the system from within. Often, they also see how their own roles perpetuate the very problems they seek to resolve. This results in two common outcomes:
- People muddle through, maintaining the status quo.
- People become defensive, shifting blame onto others out of frustration and hopelessness[v].
Mission Leadership: A New Approach
To tackle grand challenges effectively, we need new, innovative ways of organizing. One such approach is Mission Leadership[vi]. This concept has been adopted by the UK government as a means to drive societal change, based on the groundbreaking work of Mariana Mazzucato, Professor of Economics and Public Value at University College London.
Mazzucato’s framework for Mission-Oriented Innovation emphasizes:
- Solving big societal challenges
- Taking a system-wide approach
- Facilitating collaboration across governments, businesses, researchers, and communities
- Being outcome-driven but flexible on methods
- Prioritizing public value creation
- Encouraging cross-disciplinary innovation
The goal is to unite corporations, society, and government around shared, ambitious goals that create value for all stakeholders. In Mazzucato’s words:
“We need to bring together all economic actors to work differently—from governments fixing market failures to firms focused on maximizing shareholder value. A multi-stakeholder approach, with concepts like collective intelligence at the center, is needed. All stakeholders—from CEOs to communities across the value chain—must work together to create and share value[vii].”
Mission-oriented policies aim for system-wide transformation, focusing on problems rather than specific sectors, technologies, or companies[viii]. They encourage innovation across scientific disciplines, industries, and both public and private sectors. While missions set ambitious goals, they don’t prescribe how to achieve them. Instead, they mobilize a movement across an ecosystem to inspire collaboration and creativity.
Overcoming Barriers to Mission Leadership
Mission Leadership presents a radical new way of thinking about how governments and organizations tackle grand challenges. However, establishing Missions comes with significant hurdles, particularly given existing barriers to collaboration between institutions.
As an analogy, knowing we want to climb Everest is not the same as knowing how to climb it.
Unlocking the Potential of Missions
To unlock the potential of Missions, we need to shift toward a collaborative ecosystem. In our experience this requires:
- System leaders: Leaders who convene stakeholders, challenge norms, and embrace discomfort while navigating change.
- A shift in consciousness across the system[ix]: Actors across the system need to recognize its deeper beliefs and assumptions and their roles in maintaining the status quo.
- Co-creation of a shared purpose: A meaningful, compelling purpose that attracts and energizes diverse stakeholders.
- A hopeful, future oriented narrative: Focusing on possibilities rather than blame and criticism.
- Mission design: Creating forums for decision-makers to coordinate and oversee system-wide changes.
- Trusting relationships: Building a network of trust and openness across the system.
- Participation and innovation: Designing processes that enable bottom-up experimentation and cross-sectoral innovation.
Potential Traps for Mission Leadership
While Missions hold great promise, we believe they also face potential pitfalls, including:
- Top-down control: If Mission Boards attempt to control and measure outcomes rigidly, they risk undermining collaboration.
- Rewarding A whilst demanding B. Rewards often incentivise behaviours that perpetuate undesirable outcomes.
- Short-term focus: Prioritizing immediate results over long-term systemic change.
- Crisis-driven attention: Focusing on immediate crises instead of long-term goals.
- Mismatch of priorities: Conflicting priorities across departments and organizations.
- Blame culture: Encouraging fear and defensiveness rather than openness.
- Bureaucratic leadership: Imposing a rigid, top-down approach.
- Unrealistic goals: Setting unstable or incompatible aims.
Designing Missions for Success
To succeed, Missions need:
- Clear purpose: A well-defined mission, ambition and strategy.
- Organisational development and cultural interventions such as summits, parallel learning structures or communities of practice. These are crucial for fostering shared purpose, developing relational networks, and helping the system see and sense itself.
In our experience, designing an inter-organizational system is complex, requiring input from diverse stakeholders, especially those who are often unheard. The process must cover:
- Defining Mission boundaries and membership
- Agreeing on aims, purpose, and strategy
- Establishing governance and operating principles
- Identifying enablers such as communications, policies, and reward systems
- Clarifying accountabilities and decision-making rights.
Conclusion
Missions offer a promising path to addressing grand challenges and wicked problems. However, they must go beyond political or structural interventions to truly drive systemic change. For Missions to succeed, they must facilitate a transformation of consciousness across the system. Without this shift, existing paradigms will continue, and we will see more of the same. Ultimately, a small group of influential and brave leaders, committed to challenging the system and unlocking new possibilities, will be essential for enabling meaningful change.
We’ve since taken this inquiry into practice: read our research findings from our co-inquiry on Mission Leadership, which brought together senior leaders from central government, NHS trusts and the Scottish Government to explore what’s working — and what isn’t — in practice.
Need support with organisation design? We help leaders align strategy, structure, roles, governance and culture through participative organisation design. Learn more about our organisation design consulting services.
Interested in our research on organisation design? Find it here.
Click here to download a printable version of this article: Blog — How Do We Bring Missions to Life
[i] See, for example, UN sustainable Development Goals https://sdgs.un.org/goals
[ii] Ron Heifetz, Marty Linsky, & Alexander Grashow, (2009). The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.
[iii] Keith Grint (2008). Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions: the Role of Leadership. Clinical Leader, Vol. I, No. II.
[iv] Horn, Robert E.; Weber, Robert P. (2007). New Tools For Resolving Wicked Problems: Mess Mapping and Resolution Mapping Processes (PDF). Strategy Kinetics L.L.C.
[v] Otto Scharmer (2009). Theory U (2nd Edition). Leading From The Future As It emerges.
[vi] Mazzucato, M and Dibb, G. (2019). Missions: A beginner’s guide. UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, Policy Brief series (IIPP PB 09).
[vii] Mariana Mazzucato (2022). Moving beyond the rhetoric of purpose and building a truly multi-stakeholder approach. The Economist Blog.
[viii] UCL Commission for Mission-Oriented Innovation and Industrial Strategy (MOIIS) in March 2018
[ix] Otto Scharmer (2009). Theory U (2nd Edition). Leading From The Future As It emerges.
