Why do you exist?

The importance of understanding Primary Task

Working as an organisational consultant with rapidly scaling businesses, it is perhaps strange how often I come across organisations, team and individuals who struggle to answer this question, or who when they stop think find it hard to define it in succinct and practical terms.

It is important to note that this is not an existential question, although it maybe experienced as such, but simply a request to understand the specific role that an individual, team or organisations plays in the functioning of the whole.

Wilfred Bion, a psychoanalyst, whose seminal work on group dynamics detailed in Experiences in Groups in 1961, suggests that it is the groups ability to define a clear primary task which ensures they maintain a “sophisticated level of behaviour”. He suggested that in the absence of such primary task groups adopt what he termed a basic assumption mentality which maybe characterised by dependence, fight or flight and inability to focus on the work for which they are met together.

In today’s modern organisations, particularly those who are experiencing the ever changing landscape of rapid growth, this idea may perhaps be too simplistic, as in reality there are often multiple tasks at play at any one time. Recognising this limitation Miller and Rice (1967) suggest one might view primary task as a “heuristic concept” that enables individuals to make sense of their organisations, their roles and the interrelatedness of various activities.

For individuals facing such complexity, I have found such a concept very useful in separating the signal from the noise of organisational life, providing a foundation from which such individuals may start to make choices about the priorities of the day to day.

In a world full of frame-works and bullet list of advice on nearly every aspect of organisational life, it is perhaps unpopular to celebrate such simpliscity but if you are currently experiencing the overwhelmed of modern businesses, it may be useful to start by asking: “why do we exist?” and perhaps “why should anyone care?”.