This is part 2 of my discussion on mission statements:
Imagine a car repair garage and a hospital. Both have a mission statement. The garage’s hangs in the office behind the cash register, while the hospital’s hangs over the entryway doors. Here are the two statements:
We repair cars at a fair price.
To heal and do no harm.
In one sense these both reflect the tendency of mission statements to entail relatively trivial institutional descriptions. But there is also an important difference, I think. Try removing both of them from the wall one morning and see what happens. People will probably keep going to the garage and getting their cars fixed. They probably wouldn’t notice or care that the mission statement had been removed. And if they did, an explanation of “I needed to find some place to hang this Penzoil poster” would suffice.
I suspect the hospital would be very different. As Al pushes his mother’s wheelchair into the hospital he asks: “Doctor why is the mission statement removed from the wall?” The doctor replies nonchalantly: “Well we needed some place to hang the Hospital home lottery poster.” Uh oh. Red flag for Al.
There is something unsettling about the doctor’s response which is clearly different from the garage. Initially this is confusing. I said that mission statements are relatively trivial descriptions of the identity of institutions, so what is the concern? Perhaps that assumption needs to be retooled. It would seem that some mission statements are not that trivial after all.
First off, we need to distinguish between weighty institutions and non-weighty institutions. A non-weighty institution is one that, while serving an important civic function, is still not engaged in the most important aspects of society. The weighty institutions are concerned with these most important aspects which I’ll call the maintenance of the health of the body, mind and spirit in community. Weighty institutions thus include things like schools, police, and hospitals.
Second, note that once a mission statement is in place in a weighty institution, the removal of it takes on a symbolic resonance. Picture two American houses in a suburban post- 9/11 world. House A has been flying the American flag but House B hasn’t. Suddenly House A stops flying the American flag. If one of the houses will come under scrutiny from the neighbors, which do you think it will be? Of course, it will be A. Although they are both not flying the flag now, House A made an intentional choice to stop flying the flag, and that begs a question: what changed?
Similarly if there are two hospitals, and one never had a mission statement but the other had the statement “To heal and do no harm”, then if the latter suddenly removed it, the latter hospital would be the one under scrutiny.
If the removal of the mission statement takes on a symbolic value (like the removal of the flag) it stands to reason that the mission statement itself has a symbolic value (like the flag). This means that the critique in part 1 of my reflection on mission statements was wrong-headed because that critique was rooted in an analysis of propositional content. On that assumption a mission statement was to be valued if it was yielding some additional information that we wouldn’t know otherwise, or of which we need to be reminded.
But that is indeed a wrong-headed way to think about mission statements. As becomes clear when we consider removing a mission statement from a weighty institution, their real function is symbolic. A statement like “To develop Christ-minded leaders who make a difference in the world” is a sentence. But we are led astray if we think that its function within the institution is exhausted in its propositional content. Instead, that sentence operates symbolically, perhaps like a cross, serving as a mode of social identification and reinforcement.
And this brings me to the final point. The main symbolic function of a mission statement is not simply the immediate propositional content but rather the implicature — that which is implied by the propositional content. When Al brings his mother to the hospital he resonates with the symbolic import of the mission statement at the hospital because of that which is implied by it: for example, that the doctors will work to protect his mother and would never consider actions like involuntary euthanasia.
Thus, the mission statement’s symbolic function includes a range of implicature read into it by the various constituents. The significance is found not simply in what is said but in the symbolic way that what is said implies much else.
