Every organization has a purpose, its raison d’etre, its mission. A complex organization and mission is separated into sub-organizations with missions, which in turn may divide into a cascade of sub-organizations, each with a top-level purpose, a mission. Work is initiated and/or authorized through this hierarchy of purpose. A mission at one level of purpose is a goal (a sub-mission) at the next level, which in turn is translated into tasks at the third level down—relatively speaking of course.

Organizational and team best practice is to have an explicitly stated overall purpose (mission, objective), although many organizational units do not. Nevertheless, there is always purpose, explicit or implicit. A high-level purpose is in fact usually available and succinctly stated in organization and team names. Most of the key workflow links in the hierarchical units are inherent in the names of the organization, often jargon-coded to outsiders but easily read in upstream-to-downstream terms by those with the requisite local knowledge.