There’s a yellow Post-it note that’s been anchored to my desk for many months now. It’s scribbled with a newish take on an old adage by Hall of Fame football player Robert Staubach, who said “There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.” 

It’s a mantra we all try to live at Mission Partners; a reminder that our brand is built in the moments when we go beyond the expected to deliver the extraordinary. When our clients realize we didn’t just hear what they said, but we were listening between the words for what they were really trying to say. Or, when colleagues realize we remembered their best days—or were thinking of them in their hardest moments. In either case, and in many examples beyond these two, we do our best to show up and act our part, as their partners, through those moments. I believe our success has been fueled in part because we believe in the people for whom we get to serve, just as much as we believe in their mission, and we allow that belief to inspire our work.

I’m in the midst of reading Howard Behar’s book, It’s Not About the Coffee: Lessons on Putting People First from a Life at Starbucks—a powerful read on how to build trusted, innovative, and strong organizations and leaders—and the breakthroughs that can occur when when you put people over profits. In it, he recalls a short anecdote about how serious sprinters don’t see the finish line at 100 yards—they visualize the end of their race at 110-yards. That way, when you’re in a race, no one will overtake you before you reach the finish line.

As Behar writes, “this concept applies to everything we do. It tells us to think beyond the whole, or we may always fall short and undermine our results. We need to think beyond our potential to achieve great things. If you shortchange your dreams, if you shortchange your sense of who you are, you’ll shortchange your life.”

At Mission Partners, we realize that our purpose is to help others move their missions forward, often in times of great change or organizational transition. We realize that our role is to help organizations and their people communicate in a way that can build trust, belief, buy-in, or understanding.  And we realize that our role is to develop strategies that can help people get beyond whatever is broken, to a place that allows breakthroughs to happen.

This spring we’ll begin taking that role to a new level, when we open our new Design Thinking studio in our Bethesda office.  One of the first things we’ll offer for our clients—and the extended community are open Design Thinking Days…sessions for our community to bat around their big, exciting, unwieldy, or maybe not fully formed idea with someone who can listen, and then help to ideate on solutions. It’s one offering in a mini-series of new content we’ll soon roll out under our Mission Forward umbrella of services.

I often write in these posts about the importance of understanding your audience—and then calibrating to their needs. These new Design Thinking Days are just one example of how we listen to our own advice. It’s about going the extra mile, finding the added benefit, and creating the unique value, that can help our clients move their missions forward.

Learn more about our upcoming Design Thinking Days and consider attending our first session this spring.