"Mission & Vision articulate the organization's core purpose and long-term direction. They give meaning and a shared sense of purpose, clarifying why the organization exists and what it seeks to contribute. A clear mission and vision create meaning, alignment, and coherence, helping people orient decisions and efforts toward a shared goal."

Mission & Vision is the first dimension in the GreenGardens® model of organizational health, and I believe it is frequently misunderstood.

Mission and vision tend to be treated as communicative tools, often linked to branding, leadership rhetoric, or organizational identity. But the definition here points to something considerably more fundamental: the organization's ability to create coherence over time. Not only in how work is organized, but in how people experience meaning, direction, and connectedness together.

Without a shared experience of why the organization exists, organizations gradually begin to fragment. Operations carry on, targets are met, and processes function, but the inner sense of direction slowly weakens. Many high-performing organizations carry this fragmentation long before it becomes visible in results, culture, or turnover.

A concept that has helped me understand this comes from civil economy - a tradition of economic thought that goes back to Antonio Genovesi, an Italian philosopher and priest who in 1754 took up Europe's first professorship in economics, at the University of Naples. Genovesi called the subject 'civil economy' and insisted that economic life cannot be separated from the question of how people live well together. Genovesi was influential in his time, was largely forgotten for a couple of centuries, and has since the turn of the millennium undergone a notable academic renaissance.

Central to this tradition is the distinction between transaction and relation. A transaction is immediate and bounded. It concerns exchange: a performance for a counter-performance. A relation, by contrast, develops over time and rests on trust, continuity, reciprocity, and shared responsibility.

Healthy organizations need both. Organizations cannot function without structure, accountability, performance, or financial sustainability. But many organizations have gradually strengthened the transactional dimension while the relational one has weakened - often without anyone noticing while it happens.

And I believe this is closely connected to the question of mission and vision.

When organizations lose clarity about why they exist and what they are ultimately trying to contribute, efficiency almost automatically becomes the dominant organizing principle. Decisions are increasingly driven by optimization, speed, measurability, and short-term performance - not because these things are unimportant, but because they are easier to operationalize than meaning, responsibility, and long-term contribution.

Of course efficiency matters. But when efficiency gradually becomes detached from questions of purpose and direction, the character of organizational life changes too. Meetings become status updates. Collaboration becomes coordination. Responsibility is reduced to role descriptions. People still perform well, but the experience of working toward something shared begins to quietly disappear.

This is not primarily a failure of strategy. It is a failure of meaning-making.

Genovesi held that human beings are fundamentally relational. He argued that the systems we build together work best when sustained by what he called mutual assistance - a readiness to be genuinely useful to one another, not as a calculating exchange but as actual participation in each other's lives.

I believe the same shift occurs in organizations when mission and vision are truly alive. People move from experiencing work as isolated contributions to experiencing it as participation in a shared endeavor. The GreenGardens® model points to mission and vision helping people orient decisions and efforts toward a shared goal. But that orientation does not arise primarily through a written purpose statement. It arises through the lived experience that the purpose is actually real.

When that experience is present, people often begin to take responsibility beyond what is formally required. Not because they have to, but because they experience themselves as part of something that matters. When that experience weakens, something else happens too: the relational fabric slowly begins to thin.

Eventually, organizations discover that what looked like well-functioning efficiency was actually carried by trust - trust built up over a long time, but that no one is investing in any longer. This is why Mission and vision belong to the foundational dimensions of organizational health.

The Aristotelian tradition offers a useful concept here: telos. Telos comes from the Greek and refers to the deeper nature or fundamental purpose that something exists to serve. Luigino Bruni, an Italian economist and one of the most prominent scholars within the civil economy tradition today, describes, in line with Aristotle, how we can only act well within a domain when we understand its telos - its true nature. Bruni argues that the telos of the market was originally not defined as profit maximization, but as mutual benefit and cooperation. If this is regarded as the telos of the market, then the virtues that become central also change: not just competition and optimization, but cooperation, trust, and the ability to create value together over time.

The same logic applies to organizations.

When organizations begin to confuse efficiency or growth with their actual purpose, the culture, priorities, and behaviors that are rewarded gradually shift as well. Mission and vision are therefore not an inspirational addition to organizational life. They are a way of keeping the organization's telos visible - of maintaining contact with the deeper question that the organization ultimately exists to serve. The fourteenth-century merchant Francesco Datini, one of the wealthiest men in Europe, put it simply when asked why he had started his business:

Per l'amore della gente del mondo - for the love I had for the people of the world

Datini was no idealist. He was a trader, banker, and speculator. But he understood that lasting enterprise rests on something more than profit alone.

The opening definition of mission and vision begins with purpose and direction and ends with alignment and coherence. But between those poles lies something even more important: people's experience that what we do together actually matters, because of what the organization exists to contribute.