LET’S participated in the Vancouver Foundation Just and Sustainable Futures Design Sessions. The sessions are held with staff from The Vancouver Foundation and Community Advisors. In our discussion, we talked about how our work in this setting and context “support the conditions for a just and sustainable future to emerge for all”? Do we believe “a just and sustainable future” to be a Just Cause–as defined by Simon Sinek?
Vancouver Foundation Staff on the Co-Design Journey
As we begin this co-design journey, Simon Sinek’s concepts of “The Why” and “The Just Cause” provide an essential foundation for aligning our efforts with the GCI’s North Star: supporting the conditions for a just and sustainable future to emerge for all. Sinek’s work emphasizes the power of a shared, forward-looking vision—a Just Cause—that is inclusive, service-oriented, resilient, and bold enough to
inspire collective action. Unlike our personal “Why,” which reflects our past values and motivations, a Just Cause points to an aspirational future that transcends individual goals and fosters unity among diverse contributors. By rooting our session in these principles, we ensure the systems map we co-create over the following sessions captures not only the complexity of “just and sustainable” conditions in British Columbia, but also reflects the GCI’s guiding commitment to equity, justice, and the self-determination of people most impacted by systems of oppression.
Together, this approach will allow us to chart actionable pathways that resonate with the work, the lived experiences and the ambitions of all co-designers while advancing the North Star’s transformative vision as the central guiding document for this work.
Simon Sinek’s Just Cause Frame
The following is an excerpt of his book The Infinite Game:
“A Just Cause is a specific vision of a future state that does not yet exist; a future state so appealing that people are willing to make sacrifices in order to help advance toward that vision.
“Winning” provides a temporary thrill of victory; an intense, but fleeting, boost to our self-confidence. None of us is able to hold on to the incredible feeling of accomplishment for that target we hit, promotion we earned or tournament we won a year ago. Those feelings have passed. To get that feeling again, we need to try to win again.
However, when there is a Just Cause, a reason to come to work that is bigger than any particular win, our days take on more meaning and feel more fulfilling. Feelings that carry on week after week, month after month, year after year. In an organization that is only driven by the finite, we may like our jobs some days, but we will likely never love our jobs. If we work for an organization with a Just Cause, we may like our jobs some days, but we will always love our jobs. As with our kids, we may like them some days and not others, but we love them every day. A Just Cause is not the same as our WHY. A WHY comes from the past. It is an origin story. It is a statement of who we are—the sum total of our values and beliefs.
A Just Cause is about the future. It defines where we are going. It describes the world we hope to live in and will commit to help build. Everyone has their own WHY (and everyone can know what their WHY is if they choose to uncover it). But we do not have to have our own Just Cause, we can choose to join someone else’s. Indeed we can start a movement, or we can choose to join one and make it our own. Unlike a WHY, of which there can be only one, we can work to advance more than one Just Cause. Our WHY is fixed and it cannot be changed. In contrast, because a Just Cause is about something as of yet unbuilt, we do not know exactly the form it will take. We can work tirelessly to build it however we want and make constant improvements along the way.
It is the Just Cause that we are working to advance that gives our work and our lives meaning. A Just Cause inspires us to stay focused beyond the finite rewards and individual wins. The Just Cause provides the context for all the finite games we must play along the way. A Just Cause is what inspires us to want to keep playing. Whether in science, nation-building or business, leaders who want us to join them in their infinite pursuit must offer us, in clear terms, an affirmative and tangible vision of the ideal future state they imagine.