AI Cannot Write Your Team Purpose
Why team purpose has to be forged, not generated.
I watched people emblazoned with passion, while others scratched their heads with bemusement. Words appeared on flipchart that felt meaningful in one moment, and like word salad in the next.
Standing in the room with this leadership team, we had positioned the question: “What does this team need to deliver together in the next 12 months that you cannot do apart?”
I saw the conversation swirl and spiral. It felt challenging for the team and uncomfortable to witness as a coach. I told myself not to jump in, I told myself “it’s part of the process”, but there was a niggling thought in my brain: “Wouldn’t it be easier if we just threw this word salad into ‘said AI’ and let it sort it out into a striking, evocative statement?”.
CD-X on Unsplash
From sceptic to evangelist
Like many, I have been swept up in the recent wave of the AI evolution. I have moved (very quickly) from sceptical to borderline evangelical about where and how AI can support work and life, even in the parts of my work that I swore could never be touched by AI. So, why not have it write your team purpose?
Finding purpose is an embodied act
The offsite day with the team ended without us landing on a clear purpose statement. No doubt there were a few eye rolls as we reiterated that this was a journey, rather than a one off exercise. Despite our urge to wrap the day neatly, my co coach and I leant into the discomfort and allowed this exercise to remain unfinished.
As we debriefed the day, it became dazzlingly clear: AI can’t possibly write your team purpose. If it were just about words on a page, this work could always have been outsourced. Peter Hawkins, in his Five Disciplines of Systemic Team Coaching, calls the work of defining why a team exists Commissioning, and his core principle is striking: team purpose is not created, it is discovered.
The process of crafting a team purpose is an embodied, creative act. It is about the grappling and the grasping. It is about the frustration and the tensions. The divergent thinkers go big and broad; the convergent thinkers distil and try to move on. It is a push pull endeavour that is a core part of team formation.
I reconsidered the discomfort of the day. The aim of this intervention was not to arrive at a pretty purpose statement that could be stuck on a wall and forgotten about. Rather, the aim was to provide the space for the team to wrestle with their different perspectives, to feel and acknowledge the tension in the dynamics, and to find their place together. What we witnessed was the team grasping at something more meaningful than words on the page. The benefits for this team began on the day and will continue as they bring intention to their working together. Ultimately, they are building trust, commitment and collective accountability as described in Lencioni’s work.
Forging your Purpose
So, how can teams avoid the trap of outsourcing their team purpose to AI’s catchy lingo? A 2024 PNAS study found that while generative AI lifts individual creativity, it pushes collective output toward convergence: stories, ideas and statements start to resemble one another.
An AI written purpose risks landing as a polished version of everyone else’s. For this to have meaning that actually lives and breathes within the team, it’s got to be forged, not generated.
• Recognise the value in the process itself: what is the meaning making, trust building function that a task provides, and does the AI shortcut really accelerate the outcome?
• Reframe “team purpose” creation from a one off task to tick off into a living, breathing dialogue that frequently makes it onto the team meeting agenda.
• Relinquish the desire for flashy catchphrases. That’s a brand identity, not a team purpose.
Ethan Mollick describes the central question of working with AI as knowing when to partner with it, when to delegate to it, and when to take back control. Team purpose belongs firmly in the third category.
What does your team need to forge together?
Notes and references
1. Peter Hawkins, Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership, on the Five Disciplines and Commissioning.
2. Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, Jossey Bass, 2002.
3. Doshi and Hauser, “Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content,” PNAS, 2024.
4. Ethan Mollick, Co Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, 2024.
Read next: When the Team Leader is Absent on what senior teams do when leadership is missing from the room.