In the life of an organisation, there is sometimes a presence that organisational charts do not know how to represent.
One can open the articles of association, reread the corporate purpose, review the activity reports, examine the indicators, inspect the accounts, verify the theory of change, compare the organisation’s purpose with its impact objectives, and yet overlook what truly keeps the project standing. This something is rarely found in a single line of governance. It appears instead in a way of making choices, in a long-standing refusal that no one has truly forgotten, in a requirement that is difficult to explain, in a memory of the earliest trade-offs, in that discreet ability to sense that an apparently favourable opportunity does not quite correspond to what the project came into the world to do.
This invisible dimension is not abstract. It is often embodied by one person, sometimes by several, who accompanied the transition from an intuition to a reality. It may be a founder, a co-founder, a field manager, a scientific figure, a person from a territory, a historical figure, a former beneficiary who has become a point of reference, or simply someone whose presence gave the project its tone, its coherence and its way of holding action and meaning together.
This person is not necessarily the one who leads, manages, signs contracts, speaks most in public or holds the most visible title. Yet when the project hesitates, their opinion carries weight. When the organisation moves away from what gave rise to it, they perceive it. When the language becomes too polished, too financial, too technical or too detached from the field, they hear the dissonance before it becomes obvious to others. And when people seek to determine whether a decision remains faithful to the mission, they return to this person, sometimes within a formal framework, but often informally.
This person may be called the source person.
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The term may be surprising [1]. It may seem too organic for financial circles, too intuitive for lawyers, too personal for formal governance structures, and insufficiently academic for institutions. Yet it describes a very concrete reality: in many NGOs, mission-driven companies, foundations, humanitarian projects, international cooperation initiatives and hybrid organisations, there is a source of coherence, memory and discernment that the organisation cannot afford to ignore.
The question is not to sanctify this person. Nor is it to grant them power superior to that of the governance bodies. The real question is how to recognise what they carry, how to frame it, how to protect it, and above all how to transmit it before the organisation discovers too late that an essential part of its mission rested on an unwritten memory.
When Projects Grow, Their Mission Faces a New Test
At the beginning, in many impact projects, everything is built through the same movement. The vision, action, relationship with beneficiaries, search for initial funding, language choices, compromises, refusals, partnerships, intuitions, emergencies a
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