Purpose Builds Better Skateboards (and Innovations)
When your team is powered by purpose, productivity stops being a KPI and starts being a side effect.
Last week, our team did a trust-building exercise. But it wasn’t the usual offsite with beanbags, post-its, and a facilitator named Steve.
No, this one had stakes. Real ones.
We had 40 minutes to design and build a skateboard. Not for ourselves. Not for display. For kids. Specifically, disadvantaged kids who didn’t have much, and who might treasure this board as their new favourite thing in the world.
The brief was simple: make it cool. The kind of cool that matters when you're ten and your self-worth might hinge on whether your wheels turn heads.
The room, for once, wasn’t full of corporate small talk. It was quiet, focused. People who normally hover at 70% were suddenly humming at 110%. Analysts were sketching furiously. Data Scientists were attaching wheels to bearings like they were born in a workshop. Project leads were painting like it was a surgical procedure. No one asked, “When’s lunch?” Instead, we worked straight through it. Voluntarily.
And when the time came to hand over those boards, you could feel it: this wasn’t just a feel-good moment. We’d made something good. Real. Tangible. Someone, somewhere, is out there today carving up the pavement on a board made with care. A board made with purpose.
That moment stuck with me. Not because of the skateboards, but because it unlocked something I’ve felt bubbling under the surface for a while:
When people know why their work matters, they go harder, longer, and better. They don’t need micromanagement. They don’t need incentives. They need a reason.
It’s not just anecdotal. The science backs it.
McKinsey found that employees who live their purpose at work are not only more productive—they’re also healthier and more resilient. That’s a triple shot of ROI for any leader paying attention.
Harvard Business Review reports that meaningful work leads to deeper engagement and higher discretionary effort. Translation: people try harder when they give a damn.
A study from BetterUp quantified it: employees who find their work meaningful give an extra hour per week and take two fewer leave days per year. That’s the cleanest productivity gain you’ll ever see without adding headcount or coffee.
Purpose is the meta-productivity hack.
Innovation heightened by purpose
We talk a lot about innovation. New features. Breakthroughs. MVPs. Pilot programs. Post-it walls so colourful they attract bees to land. But innovation without purpose is just chaos dressed in jargon. It’s motion without meaning. And people can feel the difference.
When you anchor innovation in a purpose that people care about, especially one they helped define, you get more than outputs. You get ownership. Creativity. Resilience. You get people who want to solve problems, not just because they’re paid to, but because it matters.
In our skateboard build, the goal wasn’t “design a board.” The goal was “make a kid feel like a legend.” That’s purpose. That’s where the effort came from. That’s why people skipped lunch.
Innovation teams should take note: align to a purpose that matters to the people doing the work, not just to the quarterly roadmap, and you’ll unlock more than ideas. You’ll unlock energy. Truly infectious, inspiring, energy.