Fit for Purpose: Learning from the Past, Acting in the Present, Designing for the Future

Time is change, transformation and evolution. Still, when leadership teams gather to discuss strategy, the conversation often begins with numbers, market shares, risks, competitors and growth ambitions. All of that matters. Yet, over the years, I have come to see that most strategic challenges are not primarily technical. They are questions of time, context and alignment.

Why? Because organisations struggle when they are no longer designed for the time and context they are operating in.

What once made perfect sense begins to create friction. What once drove performance becomes a constraint. What once felt coherent becomes fragmented. And instead of asking whether the organisation is still fit for its purpose in a changed context, we attempt to optimise around the edges.

The Fit for Purpose Model, which I introduced in my book Better Business Better Future (2022), offers a different starting point. It invites us to see the organisation as a living social system unfolding across time — shaped by its past, operating in the present, and continuously designing its future.

The Fit for Purpose Model

The Fit for Purpose Model is a simple but powerful way of assessing whether a business is coherently designed to fulfil its higher purpose within its broader ecosystem.

At its core, the model asks one fundamental question: Is this organisation structurally and strategically aligned with the purpose it claims to serve?

The model consists of five interdependent building blocks, all centred around the company’s higher purpose:

1. Why – Why the company exists (its higher purpose).
2. What – What it offers (value proposition, products, services, brand).
3. Whom – Whom it serves (target groups and key stakeholders).
4. Where – Where it operates (markets, geographies, channels, ecosystem positioning).
5. How – How it operates (culture, governance, leadership, organisation, systems, incentives, processes).

These building blocks do not stand alone. They must be aligned with each other — and aligned with the ecosystemic context the company operates in, including societal expectations, technological shifts, environmental constraints, and market dynamics. This is also the context in which the company aim to be relevant and attractive, and where it creates value.

Why is it called the Fit for Purpose Model?

If the purpose is not integrated into how the company operates, the result is fragmentation — often perceived as “purpose-washing.” If the offerings are not supported by the operating model, sustainability becomes rhetoric rather than reality. If the organisation ignores shifts in its ecosystem, relevance gradually erodes.

The model therefore helps leaders:

• Identify misalignments.
• Zoom out and see the whole.
• Redesign the business for coherence.
• Ensure that purpose, strategy and operations reinforce each other.

In short, the Fit for Purpose Model is a framework for building a more authentic, integrated and future-fit business.

Becoming future-fit

Becoming future-fit is not a one-off thing. It requires learning from the past, understanding the present and designing for the future. And, continuous development.

Learning from the Past

With a strategy project as an example, this is about understanding and honouring what your organisation was originally designed for, and why it looked the way it did 10 years ago.

As your organisation has survived the test of time, it was likely well designed around the opportunities and challenges faced at the time, and calibrated to the problem it chose to solve. You don’t have to be an industrial-era business to then have optimised for scale, efficiency, predictability and control with shareholder value as the dominant logic. Many still do.

When we apply the Fit for Purpose Model retrospectively, we are looking for what we can learn from your past. Why did the company originally exist? What did it offer? Whom did it primarily serve? Where did it operate? How was it structured, governed and incentivised?

When these five building blocks — Why, What, Whom, Where and How — were aligned with their ecosystemic context, the organisation likely flourished. The tension you may feel today is rarely a sign that the past was wrong. It is more often a sign that the context has shifted.

Learning from the past means honouring the intelligence of earlier design choices while recognising that coherence is always context-dependent. Without this humility, transformation becomes reactive. With it, transformation becomes evolutionary.

Understanding the Present

With a strategy project as an example, the next step is about understanding the present. How do we do that?

We are living in a time of accelerating technological change, increasing systemic complexity, planetary constraints and shifting societal expectations. Business ecosystems are no longer stable value chains but dynamic networks of interdependence. In such an environment, friction becomes information.

When we use the Fit for Purpose Model to understand the present, we begin with the ecosystemic context. What is shaping your current reality and market? What environmental and social systems does your business rely upon? What technological shifts are currently redefining value creation? What works, and what doesn’t?

We then ask: What Big Problem are we addressing today? Are we simply optimising within yesterday’s logic, or are we responding meaningfully to emerging societal challenges?

From there, we revisit the core architecture: Is our higher purpose truly integrated into how we operate — or is it disconnected from everyday decision-making? Are our offerings aligned with long-term societal needs? Are we serving stakeholders in a way that strengthens our ecosystem, rather than extracting value at its expense? Is our operating model designed for learning and renewal — or for control and preservation?

In the research for the book Better Business Better Future (2022), I found that the companies that managed to evolve — from business as usual toward better business and beyond — demonstrated that a higher purpose is powerful. However, purpose without integration is powerless. A higher purpose that is not embedded in governance, incentives, culture and operations leaves employees cynical and stakeholders sceptical.

Designing for the Future

If learning from the past offers understanding, and acting in the present offers clarity, designing for the future demands courage. The most important strategic question is not, “How do we defend what we have?” It is, “What future are we preparing ourselves to serve?”

Every decision — every investment, every incentive structure, every hiring choice — quietly shapes the future design of the organisation. To be fit for purpose in the years ahead, leaders must cultivate temporal integrity: the ability to hold past lessons, present realities and future consequences simultaneously.

Here, we start exploring the future, starting with the unfolding context. Which larger societal scenarios may the future present? Which do we believe are most plausible?

Then we may ask:

– What kind of ecosystem will we likely operate in ten years from now? What does it mean for us, and for our different stakeholders? How might we add value in that context? Can this be done in line with our higher purpose, or does that need to evolve, too?
– Where do our distinctive capabilities intersect with long-term value creation?
– What kind of operating model and governance will be needed to support this?

In a strategy project, we would most likely create at least three different versions of the company’s plausible future position. And make sure they seem viable in the most plausible future scenarios of the larger ego-systemic context. Then we choose what future we want to co-create, and design the strategy from the future back.

Important to note is that future-fit organisations are not those that predict perfectly. They are those who continuously realign their design with an evolving context.

And this is where leadership maturity becomes decisive. An organisation cannot sustainably operate at a level of systemic complexity that exceeds the developmental capacity of its leaders. Under pressure, systems regress to familiar patterns unless you, as leaders, can hold uncertainty without collapsing into short-termism.

Designing for the future is therefore both structural and developmental work.

Strategy as Stewardship

Over time, I have come to see strategy less as planning and more as leadership and stewardship. A stewardship of ongoing alignment, intentional disruption and realignment for a higher level of coherence in purpose and action; in ecosystem reality and internal design; in short-term activities and long-term responsibility.

Future-fitness does not emerge from one workshop or one bold transformation program. It arises through an ongoing dance: conscious design of purpose, principles and structure, and learning shaped through lived experience and in constant interaction with the emerging context.

The Fit for Purpose Model gives us a way of seeing that dance – simplified. It helps leadership teams honour where they came from, see clearly where they are, and intentionally design where they are going.

A Gentle Invitation

If you were to map your organisation across time, what would you see? Where were you once perfectly fit? Where is friction now quietly signalling misalignment? And what future are you already designing — through today’s decisions, investments, and leadership behaviour?

Strategy, in its deepest sense, is not about outperforming competitors. It is about becoming coherent with the world that is emerging. And coherence, sustained over time, becomes resilience. That’s how your company will survive and thrive in the long run.

Key Insights offered:

• Every organisation was once well-designed — for a different context.
• Present friction often signals temporal misalignment.
• The future must be consciously chosen, not passively inherited.
• Leadership maturity determines how well complexity can be held.
• Coherence is a living practice — not a one-time strategic exercise.

Elisabet Lagerstedt

Elisabet Lagerstedt is the founder and director of Future Navigators. As a trusted advisor, consultant, and Executive Coach, she helps business leaders navigate beyond business as usual to build Better Business and co-create a better future - through insight, strategy, innovation, and transformation. Elisabet is also the author of Better Business, Better Future (2022) and Navigera in i Framtiden (2018).