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S4E6 - The Power of Purpose w/ Richard Boele
24 Plays4 days ago
What keeps people motivated when progress is slow, outcomes are uncertain, and challenges keep evolving?
In this episode, Richard Boele, Chief Purpose Officer at KPMG, explores the powerful role of purpose in sustaining energy, resilience, and long-term commitment to change. He explains the difference between purpose—your unique contribution and who you can’t help being—and impact, the outcomes you’re striving to achieve.
The conversation explores how reconnecting with personal purpose can help individuals stay motivated through uncertainty, while aligning personal, team and organisational purpose can unlock collaboration, engagement and a greater sense of meaning at work.
Whether you work in sustainability, leadership, organisational change, or simply want to find greater meaning in your work, this episode offers valuable insights into how purpose can help people navigate complexity, maintain momentum, and drive lasting impact.
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Transcript
Defining Purpose and Introducing Richard Bula
00:00:00
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your purpose is who you can't help being.
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What is your purpose? That's what our next guest hopes to help you find. We caught up with Richard Bula, keynote speaker at our IS Connect 26 Brisbane conference.
00:00:16
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Richard is the chief purpose officer and partner with KPMG Australia. He's a widely published thought leader on human rights, social impact, and purpose insights.
Purpose in Corporate Careers and Self-care
00:00:25
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Formerly a director at the United Nations Global Compact and his own human rights consultancy, Banara, he now focuses on the field of purpose, corporate career and personal purpose that will help realize positive impacts for society.
00:00:41
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Well, Richard, thanks for joining the show. We're here at the IS Connect 26 conference in Brisbane, and you were the keynote speaker this morning. Could you give us a little bit of a taste of the topic that you spoke on? Oh, just a taste.
00:00:53
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um look Dan, who was facilitating the panel, asked me to be provocative, right?
Differentiating Purpose and Impact with Examples
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So I guess I went in two directions in terms of being provocative. ah One was around just that...
00:01:06
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concept of sustainability and also what I heard earlier this morning during the breakfast which was around sustainability practitioners needing to be careful around looking after themselves because we're working in an area where what we're working towards can move away from us.
00:01:24
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we We have a goal, we can see that's what I'm working towards, context changes, yeah budgets change, you know cuts are made and then all of a sudden that sustainability outcome that we were working towards just moves away from us.
00:01:38
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So what I was offering to um the yeah certainly the plenary session this morning was with my purpose work what we've been doing is separating and making a distinction between purpose and impact so those two words are words people often interchange know so they'll talk about their purpose is actually an impact and and the example I was using was I had a senior leader sort of challenge me when I was first presenting to her what we intended to do in terms of bringing purpose to life at KPMG. And she sort turned to me and said, look, Richard, love the work that you and Nick do but I do not get up in the morning and want to save orangutans.
00:02:23
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And I was like, oh, actually that's perfect because we what we're doing is is separating impact and in that case, yeah the impact is an orangutan has been saved.
Unlocking Energy Through Articulating Purpose
00:02:35
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So we wanted to separate that impact from what is it that you bring to save orangutans? And in separating, we call that thing that you bring to save orangutans your purpose.
00:02:46
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That's, if you like, who you can't help being or your unique contribution. and if you bring that back to your personal purpose, then that's what you bring to create change, whether that's at work, whether that's in an environmental context to go and save orangutans, or whether that's with friends who you might then go to help because you you see a friend in trouble. What is it that you uniquely bring? Who is it that you can't help be?
00:03:11
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And yeah our I guess our truism is is that when you when you land on that, when you remember that, then you've remembered your purpose and that's what you bring. So what we also see is when people do that, and we've helped people do that, articulate their personal purpose, it unlocks energy.
00:03:29
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And i think it I think making that separation is potentially helpful um because it allows you to retain energy when that goal moves away. yeah It allows you unlock more energy that you need to start again because the goalposts have changed or the rules have changed. And and that feels like the whole sustainability journey that certainly I've been on.
Aligning Organizational and Personal Purposes
00:03:50
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And it sounded like that purpose is what gets you the outcomes in the end because you have the energy to achieve it. I think if you're connected at a personal level, you clearly know your purpose and can articulate it. If your team that you're working in you're clear in your role and bringing to life your organisation's purpose,
00:04:11
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That alignment, you know, like all the, know, if you think about all those compasses pointing in different directions when there is an alignment, if you can get all those compasses pointing using purpose and bringing purpose to life, I think that unlocks an enormous amount of energy to go and achieve the big things that certainly from a sustainable infrastructure point of view need to be achieved.
00:04:30
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I think that's important in our industry, especially being sustainability professionals. We're very much purpose driven, but we try to make it very much about the outcomes. And we're constantly being assailed for the purpose that we have. How do you encourage people to in keep going with their purpose, stay focused on their purpose in order to achieve that action?
00:04:50
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Well, if it works for people is to reflect on what is it that i uniquely bring or what does my organisation uniquely bring to the sustainability outcomes or goals or changes that we're aiming to make. and and And I think that teasing that apart...
00:05:08
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um allows you to hold on to what is it that you're uniquely contributing even when it gets hard to achieve those outcomes and those changes. um and and And that's a bit of reflection time. I think also we spend far too much time doing and we don't create, and it's maybe not so time but space, we don't create that time to just reflect and appreciate what has been achieved even if it isn't what we originally set out to achieve.
00:05:38
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Now, I know a lot of this is coming from your role at KPMG. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do and what your role is? It's a unique role. I've been at KPMG for 11 years now. as the Time has gone. um I came to KPMG when they yeah acquired my business and human rights consultancy. So, I had a social impact and human rights consultancy business.
00:06:01
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um That was bought by KPMG 11 years ago. Five years ago I got tapped on the shoulder by the yeah the then CEO who wanted me to be the Chief Purpose Officer and very simply I said, well that sounds like a crazy role, I'm not sure I want to do something like that, what is that?
00:06:16
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um And he was keen that purpose, the organizational purpose, weren't just words on a page. They were words that actually came to life. um And um yeah that's that's where, you know that that was then being our, now and when I say our, certainly for Nick and I, you know our focus has been on um bringing KPMG's purpose to life and by working at that individual level, working at that team level, and then working at the organizational level and trying to get that alignment.
00:06:48
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and Inviting people to just have conversations, you know create meaning around, here's my personal purpose, share that. Here's our team role. now Let's get alignment in the team by all having clarity around what our role is when it comes to bringing our organisational purpose to life. So
Evolving Sustainability Focus
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that's been um the most significant part of the role is that enabling of purpose. um There's been a significant part of the role which has been about navigating So I call it the navigator part, which is storytelling. I guess like I'm doing now, it's just sharing stories and and and sharing stories on the panel this morning. And then the the the third part of the role has been a challenger. So challenging the organisation, challenging leadership in terms of decision making aligned with purpose.
00:07:35
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I assume that's industry agnostic. We're working in infrastructure. yeah What you're looking for is something that helps anyone in any industry. But working in sustainability, sometimes our problem is wanting to be purposeful in too many places. yeah So how do you recommend people reduce the amount of purpose so that they're finding a focus area where they really can make that impact? To me, um it's important to then...
00:08:02
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Go where there's more possibility of change because I think if you're in a context um where it's impossible or near impossible, you need to find a lot of reserves and resilience to keep at it. um So I've certainly, as ah as a consultant, I've always sought out in those early days, late 90s, early two thousand s when we moved back to Australia,
00:08:24
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I went to leading companies who were making voluntary commitments and that's where the early days for me as a sustainability practitioner were focused in looking to do that really leading thinking with leading companies. and Today it's a very different sustainability landscape even on the social side know people now you know they don't talk about necessarily broader human rights assessments anymore, it's
Viewing Work as an Adventure
00:08:52
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modern slavery, right? Because that's what's legislated and that's where the compliance requirement is and that's where the investment now from a, know, if you're working in an organisation, the investment is now, like okay, how do I ensure that there isn't modern slavery in my supply chain? So things have changed. We've also had Ruggie, the voluntary principles on business and human rights have come in
00:09:14
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So it's a very different landscape than when I began You're right, 15 years ago there weren't so many opportunities where you could feel like you were making progress because there was so much resistance against it but now there's so many open areas where we've seen so much project progress happen that whatever your passion is you can get involved in that specific area and probably make a difference. I think there's been widespread little shifts.
00:09:39
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Perhaps the frustration is is we don't yet see those broader shifts but That's what Matt was talking about this morning, right, on the panel is you know half of, at times now, half of ah Australia's energy needs are met with renewables. yeah right To me that's... You can see it real time. Yeah, that's exciting progress.
00:09:58
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I used to ask people um our age, how did you first get interested in sustainability and climate change and how how did it first... come to you like it was there an aha moment and when I speak to people under 30 they just look at me with a blank face
Insights from Purpose Week at KPMG
00:10:12
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because it's always been a part of their life whereas and in our early years it was something rather revolutionary.
00:10:19
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One of the things I like that you said was that work is an adventure and that helps give people purpose because they find they're on an adventure when they go to work in the morning. Can you talk about that a little bit?
00:10:30
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Work becomes, I guess, easy to experience as an adventure if you're able to show up at work in terms of who you can't help being, right? So sometimes that's called, know, bring your whole self to work. To me, that i don't necessarily think you do bring your whole self to work. I'm not sure if you ever do bring your whole self to work because some of your work colleagues would probably just walk out the door if you truly brought your whole self to work, right? Too frightening. But to bring who you can't help being, to bring that core of what you uniquely contribute,
00:11:01
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I think most work colleagues would say that's what they love about you. right That's what I love about working with Seth, right? He's always, yeah, whatever that might be, go on Seth if I was going it someday. There we go. And I guess that for me is how you turn work into adventure. If you spend that time reflecting, you spend that time remembering who you can't help being, and that then ah that empowers you then to bring that to work or in any other context. um And I guess for me, work is life and I've got the privilege of being able to experience work in a way where I touch many people and I have that opportunity to invite many people to connect with work differently through the purpose work that I do as as that Chief Purpose Officer.
00:11:52
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And you believe so much in this that I understand you're writing a book. Yes. So you're quite committed to it. What do you what do you plan to put in this book? ah What we're going to put in the book is everything that we've learned ah through bringing Purpose to Life in the last few years at KPMG. and So what we did last year was we ran Purpose Week and we had over 5,000 people that attend our events across the country. So we called it Purpose Week. In some places it was one day. In other places it was four or five days, but we went around the whole country over about four months.
00:12:27
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And when you have hundreds and hundreds of conversations around purpose, you start to listen and learn a lot. Like we had a thousand people tell us what the word purpose means to them.
00:12:38
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We had ah hundreds of people engage with
Anatomy of Purpose: Personal, Team, Organizational
00:12:43
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a personal purpose by coming along to a Purpose Forge. Purpose Forge is our personal purpose program.
00:12:49
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um Five steps that takes you to our TIC, helps you to remember your personal purpose. and We did work with teams in terms of facilitating process that allowed the team to align and understand what their role is in bringing to life.
00:13:04
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um the organization's purpose and then obviously we were bringing the whole organization's purpose to life and just inviting people have a conversation around what does Inspire Confidence and Power Change mean and um and and yeah and that was just um extraordinary to see such engagement, to see such energy and come from a conversation around purpose.
00:13:32
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So, yeah, really, really excited in terms of the insights that we gained from that. And the key one was that anatomy of purpose. You know, you've heard me talk about that a number of times, that individual purpose personal purpose.
00:13:43
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You generally feel like you belong in an organization to a team. You don't necessarily, except in smaller organisations, you don't necessarily go to the organisation, you talk about the team, yeah? Because that gives you your sense of connection, yeah? And from connection comes energy as well.
00:14:03
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and So that's why we've really focused in understanding what we need to do or to unlock the energy that comes from purpose at a team level and then that organization level. So we call that our anatomy of purpose.
00:14:14
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Alongside that is ah is a range of what we're calling axioms, truisms, and um yeah know they you you heard me say is, you know, your purpose is who you can't help being. That's one of our fundamental axioms in terms of our purpose work.
00:14:30
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um And another one is, you know, your purpose is remembered, not invented. So most leadership development work, you tend to kind of go, here I am, here's my current state, what do I want to be in the future state?
00:14:46
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And then you amplify the strengths and you work on the weaknesses. Our purpose program, Purpose Forge, it's a reflect it's it's reflecting, it's remembering. who you can't help being, what is it that shaped me in terms of the joy, um the events, the places, the people that have shaped me, how have tough times shaped me to now make me smile, what are my passions, and we invite people to reflect in that way. and through that they remember their purpose.
00:15:12
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and But there's other things, yeah are that other we've got um we've got eight axioms there. um
Role of Personal Purpose in Organizations
00:15:17
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Also, um you know if if you go through a personal purpose remembering process,
00:15:25
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If you don't feel like you're about to fail, if there isn't tension as you go through that process, it's not gonna be successful. Another one is doing purpose work, you need to be invited in.
00:15:37
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You cannot force working on purpose onto anyone. What does that mean inviting in? If you're going to, I can't um say, Seth, you've got to do Purpose Forge because it'll be, exactly, it'll be so good for you. You've got to take a step towards saying, yeah, actually, because my personal purpose, I've got a sense of my purpose.
00:16:01
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And most people absolutely have that. Like when we went around, um, know, we would ask people, so in terms of your current role, how much of how much how much do you expect your role to be able to be able to allow your personal purpose to come to life? And people would answer somewhere between, you know, 60 to 80%. You know, that's what I expect of my role and while I'm at work.
00:16:26
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And then the second question is is, well, how much does it allow you to live your personal purpose while you're at work? And there were two groups. There was generally a smaller group that would say, well, 60 to 80. They're clearly in the right jobs, right? Yeah, they're they're clearly in places that enable them to live their purpose.
00:16:45
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And then there was a larger group, much larger group that would discount that by 30%. So they would say, oh, somewhere between 30 to 60%.
00:16:54
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And then we would say, okay but what is your purpose? And then almost 95 plus percent of people would be able to give us a sense of their purpose, but they wouldn't necessarily be able to articulate.
00:17:08
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a clear purpose statement that has come from what they've remembered, that's come from their past, through the events, the people, the things that have shaped them, that have given them joy, and given them energy. And that's that's what we, um me I guess that's what we've developed through the work at KPMG and that's what we're really keen to share through the book.
00:17:26
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So how would an organisation mine that by asking their employees, trying to find out what their purpose is and then actually utilising that to drive the organisation? i think I think personal purpose is personal. So I think as an organisation, all you can do is enable people to remember to connect with their personal purpose.
00:17:48
Speaker
If that works for them in terms of creating more energy for them to do their job, then I would say that's just a secondary benefit. I don't think you can do any work at a personal purpose level within an organisational context where you can expect that person to surrender the energy that might come from that.
00:18:07
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to the organisational context, right? But what you can do is work with your team and create, you know, the teams that make up your organisation to create real clarity around the team's role in bringing to life the organisation's purpose. And then I think there's loads that you can do at an organisational level to create a culture, to create a daily environment where people do.
00:18:33
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question or reflect on um a a decision that goes to that organization's purpose. That's something that we do in infrastructure all the time around sustainability is we we don't have to ask people what their purpose is. We give them we empower them in order to find out what it is and then run with it. And whatever they can do to contribute yeah using their purpose, it gives them that sense of pride with them along with that. Perfect.
00:19:00
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Perfect. And I think that's really powerful. Now, my question is is, when you do that, do they articulate or do they connect with an impact or an outcome that they label as their purpose?
00:19:13
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Or do they actually have a process, a way of being supported where they're actually remembering their personal purpose, who they can't help be? Well, you'd said, and I like this, I'm paraphrasing, you said, purpose lives in conversation, courage, and curiosity. Mm-hmm.
00:19:28
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Those are three very different things but they all are related in kind of that discovery and adventure process. yep Yeah. When you have that moment and I have that opportunity daily as a purpose coach is to see people um connect and like my personal purpose is to create moments of magic where all voices are heard.
Richard Bula's Personal Purpose and Conclusion
00:19:50
Speaker
thought that was a very relevant moment during the panel that you were asked, how do you sleep at night? Because people with purpose, unfortunately, that comes with the understanding of what's actually acting against your purpose or the hurdles that you might face. So how do you sleep at night and how can other people sleep at night? i didn't i didn't answer the question on stage, so I'm glad you came back to it, Seth.
00:20:14
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mean, the answer is quite simple. With that really clear personal articulation of my purpose, you know, to create moments of magic where all voices are heard. And Seth, do you want me to unpack that? Do you want to know where that comes from? Yes. I want you to unpack it in a way that's going to help other people find it in themselves. Okay, and moments of magic, where does that come from?
00:20:36
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Well, when I was seven or eight, I learned to do magic tricks really badly, right? I mean, really bad, I was terrible, crap out it. But in doing it, what I was able to do was hold adults' attention, right? And being the extrovert, i mean, it's no surprise, right? I'm i'm the extrovert, right? it it it was It was addictive. I loved being able to hold that attention.
00:21:00
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Why did I become a consultant? Because I love nothing better than doing the research and preparing for that question with a client where they go, oh my goodness me, that's an amazing question.
00:21:11
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So there's there's a line there through all these experiences that I've had that shaped me, that continue to um continue to give me energy.
00:21:23
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right like I get enormous energy from being able to get up on stage. I love it. But we're all voices are heard, so when I was 21 I finished, where does that come from? um i was in Tibet, I was on the 1st of October 1987, there was an uprising, Tibetan man was shot and killed next to me, a young Tibetan boy came and grabbed me by the hand, took me to his father's apartment, where his father proceeded to say to me, he said, look, I'm Tibetan, but I can't leave my country.
00:21:52
Speaker
um you can leave my country. So please go home and tell your people what you've seen today. So I took that experience, came back to Australia and helped set up the Australia Tibet Council, which I'm really proud is still running today, that gave voice to Tibetan people.
00:22:09
Speaker
And two or three years later, i gave evidence at a permanent people's tribunal in Strasbourg um on my experiences in Tibet. um And one of the judges came up to me later and he was ah he was a judge called Justice Michael Kirby, who's well-known judge here in Australia, former Supreme Court judge.
00:22:31
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And he came up to me he said, Richard, I love your passion for the Tibetan people. But I think your potential and your potential for greater impact that is there if you look at human rights across the globe and not just the human rights of the Tibetan people. and But I think you should lift your sights, you should look higher because I think you've got the potential to have impact on scale, on a bigger scale, and you'll do that if you then focus on human rights globally.
00:23:01
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And just that one conversation got me thinking and ended up with a focus on business and human rights, that intersection between business and human rights, which has now led me obviously to this broader world of corporate sustainability.
00:23:16
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Those are just some of the stories in my past that once I gave myself the space to reflect, I remembered what my purpose was and I now have the words that are really my words, right?
00:23:30
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Create moments of magic where all voices are heard. They are my personal purpose words. No one else can take that purpose from me and go, this is my purpose because no one else has the stories that I have in terms of how I've just brought that to life. That's the adventure you're on. Everyone's purpose takes them on a new adventure and that's how they can sleep at night.
00:23:48
Speaker
That's how I sleep at night is having that purpose. I've got the opportunity to stand up in front of all these people across KPMG to create moments of magic for them and allow them to hear voices that they otherwise wouldn't hear in terms of bringing purpose to life and giving meaning to them and energy to them.
00:24:07
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So I love to think of, if you like, that I can sleep at night because the purpose work And the way that we think about purpose and the way we bring purpose to life for people um is about unlocking energy.
00:24:20
Speaker
So i'm I'm the chief purpose officer in the business of creating energy. That's very inspiring. Well, thank you so much for being on the show, Richard. Thanks, Seth. Loved it.
00:24:32
Speaker
Thank you for listening to another episode of Infrastructure Connections. Please take a moment to follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And we want to hear your thoughts. Leave a comment down below to let us know what you think.
00:24:44
Speaker
Stay tuned for the next episode of Infrastructure Connections.