Is your business being pulled, or pushed?

Picture a long train. Pulled from the front, the carriages fall into line behind the engine — any kinks straighten out. Push that same train from behind and it buckles: the carriages jack-knife and it develops kinks. A business works the same way. When something out in front is pulling it — a clear sense of who you are and where you're headed — the day-to-day falls into line. When it's shoved along from behind by whatever is loudest this week, it kinks.

"Pushing" has a precise meaning here. It's any moment the order gets inverted: tactics start dictating strategy, strategy dictates your vision, vision dictates your purpose, or your purpose dictates your sense of who you are — instead of each being led by the one above it. More simply: it's whenever the urgent, loud and pressing short-term wins out over the quiet, unglamorous, important long-term.

Five things, stacked top to bottom

The model stacks five things, and the order is the whole point — each one should pull the one below it, never the other way around.

Identity — a single preposition

The foundation is where you stand in relation to something bigger than the business — captured, oddly, in one small preposition: with, under, beside, behind, held by. For many South African founders that anchor is their faith, and the model was born in a Christian setting; there, identity is framed around what God says about you. Name it in whatever terms make sense for you. The point isn't the label — it's that your sense of who you are is settled and received before you start striving, so the business becomes something you steer from, not something you're anxiously trying to become. Most founders can point to a moment — a sensing, an encounter, an experience — that put the word there.

Purpose — a verb

Purpose is the action you step into in the moments you feel most fully yourself, most alive. It's a verb: to advise, to teach, to father, to lead, to empower, to build. Notice it's not your job title. Two people running identical businesses can have completely different verbs underneath — and it shows in what they'd never delegate.

Vision — an adjective

Vision is the quality you want to leave behind in the places you've left your footprints — a single adjective. Not a revenue figure; a flavour. Whole. Dignified. Unhurried. Fair. It's the word a client or a staff member would reach for, months after working with you, to describe what it was like.

Strategy — your realms, and how they feed each other

Below that sits strategy: the handful of realms your life actually runs in — your work, your home, your community, your own health — and how they flow into each other to produce that one adjective in each of them. Kinks often show up here first, as one realm quietly borrowing from another for months on end.

Tactics — match the move to the kind of problem

Tactics are the systems you build to handle the specific challenges each realm throws up — and the right kind of system depends on the kind of problem. Clear problems have a known best answer: find it, write it down, follow it every time. Complicated ones need an expert who has walked the road before you. Complex ones — where cause and effect only make sense in hindsight — want small experiments that are safe to fail, then amplified or dropped on the evidence. Chaotic ones, where you've lost control of the main factors, want action first to stabilise, and investigation only once it's safe.

A pushed train doesn't need more force. It needs something out in front, pulling it straight.

So the diagnostic is simple. When a decision feels like a scramble, walk back up the stack. Is this tactic serving the strategy, or has it started running it? Is the strategy still shaped by the vision, or by this month's noise? Nine times out of ten, the kink is an inversion — the urgent has climbed a rung it doesn't belong on.

A note on where this comes from. The whole picture — a train pulled from the front rather than pushed from behind, with identity, purpose and vision sitting above strategy and tactics — we owe to Stephen K. De Silva, CPA (retired) (visit www.ProsperousSoul.com for mentorship, training and coaching), who calls it the Purpose Train ©. The five levels and their order are his. We've blended his model with two other ideas and want to be honest about the seams: the four kinds of problems in the tactics section come from Cynefin, a sense-making framework by Dave Snowden, and are our own answer to how you handle tactics rather than part of De Silva's model; and splitting strategy into "realms" is our own addition — in his model, strategy is simply the plan that carries the vision toward the day-to-day, not something he divides this way. Take what's useful.

The IBIS team

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