This video and the article is part of a series of exercises taken from the ResultMaps workshop, “How to Accelerate Results with Accountability + Ownership." This exercise works best when preceded by the decision design exercise, which you can find here.

At ResultMaps, we look at company mission as the title of a company’s story. Lego’s mission nails it: “inspiring the builders of tomorrow.” Nike’s mission isn’t “just do it,” it’s “to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” When you look at a mission statement like that, you can see all their product lines come together.

Still, you don’t need the perfect mission that sends your marketing director over the moon. You just need to start with something effective. In this article, we’re going to help you create an ugly first draft of your mission statement. The idea of the ugly first draft is that nobody vomits perfection. The way you get better is by writing something - anything - then working on what you’ve written.

You just want to get the process started. Here’s how:

The memory hooks exercise

Think of your company’s vision and core values as a book, and you’re brainstorming book titles. Take five minutes and get five ideas down using the spreadsheet resources. Don’t critique yourself, just write.

Step 1: Brainstorm

• If you need some inspiration, head here to see some examples.

• If there is no clear winner, revisit this 1-2 times a week to add 3 more ideas

• Use an AI tool to re-write your ideas and make suggestions to get your mind going

• Get your team involved and see if any of their ideas resonate

Step 2: Assess

We’ve included a criteria in the spreadsheet that you can use to rank your ideas; rate each idea on a scale of 1 to 5 for how much the concepts resonate according to whether the idea:

• gives you an emotional kick

• is easy to remember

• can be depended on to help employees internalize your vision statement and core values

• is at a 6th-grade reading level or lower according to the Hemingway app

A bonus ranking criteria: is it tweet-able? The whole point is to give people a hook they can use conveniently. Don’t create long ideas that are hard to convey and even harder to make people remember.

Step 3: Choose the winning idea

It should complete this sentance: "At {company name} we are on a mission to _____________.” Now, you’ve got your mission statement.

The original video from the workshop