After the previous article in this journal, a question stayed.
Not a comfortable one.
Every story I’d shared had the same shape underneath it. An organisation with significant capability. A brief that defined the boundary. And a gap — sometimes vast, sometimes precise, always preventable — between what was delivered and what could have been.
The question was this.
What would have to be true for that not to happen?
Not in one organisation, in one programme, at one moment. Consistently. As a matter of how an organisation operates rather than how it occasionally performs when the right person asks the right question at the right time.
I’ve spent considerable time with that question. Tested it against the stories in this journal and against thirty years of watching organisations make large decisions. And I’ve arrived at something I want to share here — not as a finished answer but as a working proposition.
Three lenses
Three concentric lenses make the structure visible. Not as a replacement for existing strategy frameworks, as a specific tool for examining where purpose currently lives and where it could extend.
The primary lens — what you actually are
This is the innermost lens. It asks the organisation to define itself with operational honesty rather than aspirational language.
What is your core business? Not what do you say you exist to do — what do you actually do, every day, that generates value and sustains the organisation? What are the capabilities at the centre of that activity? What does your infrastructure enable? What does your data contain?
This lens is not about limiting the organisation’s sense of itself. It’s about being precise enough about what the primary purpose actually is that the boundaries become visible. Because it’s at those boundaries that the secondary lens starts to reveal something useful.
The secondary lens — who is already in your world
The second lens looks outward from the primary to the ecosystem that already exists around the organisation. Not the market in the commercial sense — the full network of relationships, dependencies, and connections that the organisation is already part of.
Suppliers. Partners. Users. Communities. The people and organisations whose lives and work the primary business already touches.
The secondary lens almost always reveals capability and potential that the primary lens can’t see. At the telecommunications provider in the previous article, the secondary lens would have revealed a living map of how the country functioned — how people moved, communicated, connected, struggled, and needed. Visible to anyone who looked with genuine curiosity.
Nobody looked.
The tertiary lens — where you operate in the world
The third and outermost lens asks the organisation to look at the context in which it exists. Not its market. Its place.
Where does the organisation operate? What are the challenges in that place — geographic, social, economic, environmental — that the organisation has some capability to address? Not necessarily directly or alone. But in connection with others, through its infrastructure, through its relationships.
The healthcare programme from the article before last had an extraordinary tertiary lens. The challenges in those locations — education, economic development, community resilience — were visible to anyone who looked. The capability to address them was present in the programme’s own architecture.
The tertiary lens was never opened.
The four things the framework requires
The three lenses tell an organisation where to look. But looking is not enough on its own. The stories in this journal have demonstrated that clearly.
Four things need to be in place for the lenses to produce something more than an interesting exercise.
The first is ownership, not as individual responsibility but as collective habit. One person seeing the wider potential cannot move an organisation that hasn’t built the habit of looking. That’s a cultural proposition, not a governance one.
The second is timing as a living practice rather than a scheduled event. The wider question needs to be present at the moments that matter — before the brief is written, before the investment is committed, before the programme is scoped.
The third is language. Organisations that want to develop the capacity to ask the wider question need to build a shared vocabulary for it, a living common language that anyone can use, challenge, and evolve.
The fourth is measurement. What doesn’t get measured remains invisible including the gap between what was delivered and what could have been.
What I’m building toward
The three lenses and the four requirements are the working framework. Practical enough to apply. Honest enough to acknowledge what it doesn’t yet fully resolve.
But sitting underneath all of this — emerging from the stories in this journal, from the framework I’ve been building, and from my reading of how other thinkers have approached the challenge of building deliberate organisational capability — is something larger.
A model for what an organisation looks like when it has built the capacity to ask the wider question not as a programme or a process but as a defining characteristic of how it operates. When the wider question isn’t asked occasionally by the right person in the right moment but consistently, structurally, as a matter of cultural habit.
I’m not ready to name it fully yet. The book is where it gets named properly and built out completely.
But I can tell you the shape of it. It’s an organisation that has decided, deliberately, to develop its capacity to see and act on its wider potential as a core function — not an add-on, not a values exercise. A core function. As fundamental to how it operates as the primary business itself.
That kind of organisation is possible. I’ve seen glimpses of it.
The difference is not small.
An invitation
This framework has been built from thirty years of experience and four specific stories. It is not complete. It will be stronger for being tested.
Does the three lens model reflect how your organisation understands itself or doesn’t? Have you seen the secondary or tertiary lens examined seriously, or does the primary lens absorb everything?
What’s missing from the framework as I’ve described it?
And — the question that matters most — have you been in the room where the wider question was asked and taken seriously? What made that possible?
I’d genuinely like to know. The responses to this article will shape what the book becomes.
*This is the seventh entry in the Predictive Purpose journal — a book being built in public. If you’re reading this for the first time, start at the beginning. Subscribe at neilcatton.substack.com.
Neil Catton is the author of The Next Evolution, The Cognitive Crucible and The Shadow System - available on Amazon, and writes at the intersection of technology, ethics, and human purpose.