We’ve been messing with AI since the sixties, and language has always been a highly desired output. From early linguistic/NLP machines to chatbots to the LLM, we have sought a system that spoke to us. Ability with language is how we think about thinking.

This is why we have very quickly conflated accuracy of word prediction with intelligence when dealing with the excellent language models we use today. Those really impressed by the models ascribe sentience to them.

These quasi-sentient silicon brains are immensely powerful and they are constrained to, and constrained by, language. Which means that for us to make the absolute best of them, we need an exceptional ability to translate the complexity of our thoughts into language.

LLM’s biggest feature is where the problem lies

The AI systems we use are trained on vast amounts of data. Specifically, training data for language models is a mind-boggling corpus of text that people around the world have written. This means that the language a LLM will propose to us is an average of all of that training data under the (mostly correct) assumption that it will be the favoured output.

But this isn’t to say we can’t skew the output to suit who we are and what we want out of it.

These are two separate notions. Who we are is concerned with our identity and what we want out of the LLM is defined by our ability to understand the task at hand. Both of these will be limited by language in all senses.

Our identity is complex, multifaceted, and ever-shifting, so that it grows and evolves as we live and learn. It is hard to put into words but we have no real choice when it comes to dealing with a LLM.

The same applies to our skillset. If while working we take spot decisions based on our experience and intuition, decisions that we sometimes can’t fully explain to others, we are going to have to find a way to dissect, codify, and articulate that decision for it to interface with AI tools.

I’m an amateur photographer so I will borrow an example from an area that’s familiar to me. I consider a camera to be a tool. I can use my phone, I can buy a €1,000 camera and lens, and I can buy a €50,000 camera and lens. In every case, my ability to make a beautiful picture is limited by my imagination and training and experience, not by how much I’ve spent on the camera.

Another way of putting it is that I bring myself to a shoot, and carry a camera as a dumb but very capable and obedient tool. If a better photographer turns up with a shitty camera, they will still produce much more beautiful photos than I can.

“Bringing myself” to a shoot is a combination of my identity and my skill set. This is even more crucial when using AI tools.

Conforming identity into language

We no longer have the luxury of being able to wing it when it comes to identity. The more defined, the better articulated, the more detailed our description of our own identity is, the better chance we have of an LLM output that matches who we are.

The same applies to our unique skill. If we know why we do what we do and exactly how it is different from every other provider of that service, the more we are able to harness the incredibly powerful tools that we have at our disposal.

As annoying as it might sound, we have to take all we know about ourselves and about what we do and describe it to the best of our ability using language that is clear, detailed, and unambiguous.

This means that we have to be intentional and deliberate about everything that really matters to us.

Our identity matters. Who we are is usually a combination of why we do what we do, the principles that guide us, everything that we love doing, and what we consider to be our contribution to society. Call it ikigai, call it purpose, call it self-fulfillment - ironically trying to force our life’s meaning into a single word - but make sure it is as all-encompassing as it can get because it defines who you become along the journey we call life.

What we do is a bit more utilitarian and should be a description of what it is we can do that pays the bills - usually along with everything that differentiates us from all others who possess the same skill.

If you are to stop for a moment and consider the two paragraphs you’ve just read, you should feel that the expectation verges on the overwhelming. How is it possible to gather all we know about ourselves, to describe the uniqueness of our existence, in a few paragraphs?

If you’re not daunted by the prospect, you are either unaware of the magnitude of the task or you’re quite a boring individual. I’m betting it’s the former.

What I can assure you is that the time and effort you put into the task will pay for itself in spades, and the revenue will compound.

Identity as a superpower

Know yourself, know your enemy, and in a hundred battles you will not perish.

I never thought I’d be quoting something as over-quoted as The art of war but here we are, on a battlefield when your greatest ally can be your greatest enemy.

The tools that are available to everyone, the ones that are creating a metric fuckton of ‘AI slop’ every minute, are yours to harness provided you do the hard work up front.

Think of writing. Cheap, AI-produced writing is getting cheaper as more of it is produced and, paradoxically, as AI gets even better at it. The more we produce, the lower the value, and this will tend to zero-cost for a pretty decent output.

But there is already a rising need for excellent output, the kind only possible as a result of a human brain’s ability to misfire, to make mistakes, and to draw on unlikely sources of inspiration. Our messiness is what separates us from the meticulous weight-assigned nature of silicon engines. And our messiness is unique to us as an individual - our identity is a collection of the quirks and oddities that we gather into a box and call “me”.

This messy, complex, and wholly unique way of thinking is your superpower. I am using that word literally - a power that is above and beyond what the typical human can wield. Because we are in an age when a computer can amplify our brain’s abilities and allow us to reach beyond what we imagined possible.

Think back to the task I mentioned in the previous section where I suggested you distil your identity into words and consider how important this capture is. It must accurately contain your life’s purpose or what you consider to be your role in your community. It should gather the set of principles or values you abide by and have them clearly articulated because these form the foundation for your ethical core and your decision-making. Then there are your likes and dislikes, your sources of inspiration, the thinkers who you feel you resonate with, what you find funny or disturbing, and the people you’d want to hang out with or pick a fight with.

Elements of your personality are vital, too. We tend to have a messy persona that shifts ever so slightly based on who we are with and the context we find ourselves in.

Your tone of voice is hard to capture (and nigh on impossible to get a LLM to perfectly abide by) but it is very well served as a final layer of polish on top of a structurally sound identity definition. It is also the part that matters least because it’s easiest to edit for.

If you think this will take you weeks, then you’re probably on the right track. If you think you’d be best served going through this process with an impartial third party, you are also correct. You need someone who will not take your side or tell you what you want to hear. If I were a therapist, it would be the only service I’d offer from now on.

Once you feel you have a relatively complete document that gathers who you are in detail, sit with it for a while. Read it and experience the discomfort of staring into an unforgiving and truthful mirror. Test drive it with the LLM of your choice. Try the same prompt with and without your identity layer and examine the outputs. Are the differences considerable? Does the output when your identity is in use match the way you think and feel?

Take all the time you need on this step. Sure, the identity document is one you can keep refining, but ‘good enough’ doesn’t make for a superpower.

How we do what we do

The first step is one that gives a solid foundation for who we are but if we want our work to be elevated to a level that augments our output, the way we do what we do must also be captured as accurately and with as much detail as possible.

Why do people choose you over your peers? What is it that makes what you do special? Unless what you do is wholly unique, in which case you may abuse of your monopolistic position and stop reading, you have a unique combination of elements that give you an edge.

This is partly down to who you are - and that has already been captured. Starting with identity has made this part of the process much more straightforward. But there is more. You have learned as you went along, tucking experience and expertise into your tool belt and putting them to work for you.

Look at the projects or clients you feel represent you best. The ones that have driven you to do your best work, the ones that you are excited to jump out of bed in the morning and work on. These are the ones to dissect critically and to capture in their entirety.

What were you thinking when you made the specific decisions that made that project such a brilliant addition to your portfolio? What aspects of the relationship made for such a high level of two-way trust? What milestones or choices would you always want to repeat in the future?

Once again, detail matters. If you always apply a specific set of principles to the way you work, principles or learnings that have now become second nature, you need to revisit your origins and describe them comprehensively.

Say you are happy with a product you designed and that it reflects a functional sparsity that you are now known for. Writing ‘minimal aesthetic’ or something of the sort hasn’t given any depth of context.

Think back to when you started, to the greats in whose footsteps you followed, to the products you looked and fell in love with, and just dump whatever comes to mind. The ‘less is more’ principle by Van der Rohe, ‘less but better’ that defined Rams’ work for Braun and Vitsoë, ‘add lightness’ as espoused by Colin Chapman, Saint-Exupery’s notion that good design is when there’s nothing left to take away, and the resulting products and structures that have stayed with us. The SK4, the Barcelona pavilion, the MX5, and even the sparsity of language that makes ‘The little prince’ so staggeringly monumental. This is the baseline level of detail you need to capture.

I started by saying that language can only give an approximation of the inner workings of our mind but this isn’t to say that the approximation can’t be thorough and as close to complete as we can reasonably achieve.

From the individual to the organisation

An organisation has an identity that is possibly more carefully constructed than that of an individual so there should already be elements of it in place. This isn’t to say that all organisations have theirs down pat. The bullshit you see output by some of the more respectable companies out there confirms this.

Many organisations conflate brand with identity because, for the longest time, boardrooms have abdicated their responsibility and pawned identity onto the marketing department. We are finally in an era where the monumental stupidity of this move will become clearer and clearer.

It is the perfect time for any business to take a moment to examine their identity and define it in a way that truly articulates who they are and what they stand for. A crashing wave of same is about to engulf us, multiplying the plague of commoditisation by several orders of magnitude. A unique and messy identity is one of the few structures that can shelter us from it.

Those companies that have “Integrity, professional, trustworthy” on the wall behind the reception desk will be the ones we will completely forget. The ones that know who they are and act with a certainty about who they are for, who they leave out, and why what they does really matters will be the ones we cosy up to as we the consumer seek shreds of humanity beneath that crashing wave.

We are used to speaking about organisational identity as a transformational notion, as a platform for consistent decision-making, the bedrock of cohesive communication, the only guarantee of successful hires, and the bastion that repels the ravaging effects of commoditisation. It is now one of the last remaining attributes that can make the difference between collapsing into vagueness and carving out a unique springboard for thriving.

I’ve written about this at length in ‘The Final Estate’ and it contains a practical framework to follow for a defined organisational identity that makes decision-making easier at all levels of the organisation. Crucially, it enables anyone who uses a LLM on your organisation’s behalf to have an output that matches the identity of the company.

The human/machine interface

A cautionary note about discipline and boundaries is essential.

No matter what our personal classification for Large Language Models may be, what counts is that we clearly distinguish our role in our relationships with them. We are the ones who do the thinking, particularly in our specific area of expertise, while the LLM is there to do the execution. We strategise, they work.

This is an important distinction to make. If you can’t cook to save your life, it’s fine to take a photo of your fridge and ask your pet LLM to give you a recipe. The consequence is low-impact. But for anything where your identity and skillset is paramount to the way you differentiate yourself from all others, a clear distinction of roles is essential.

You are the one who is imposing the identity. You remain the one who describes what you want done, how you want it done, and what your performance metrics are. Your critical eye on the output is what allows you to dodge the trap of accepting confident and articulate nonsense at face value.

Garbage in, cabbage out

Ever since we started messing with computation, we have known that a coherent output requires a coherent input.

We are now in an age where our confusion can be amplified at a staggering rate, such that the output from a machine can have absolutely no useful relationship with the input we have provided. That is on us. We can’t blame the camera for taking a poor photo.

But the opposite is true. The future belongs to those who can be clear about who they are and what they want. Clarity of identity and of intent will create the next generation of successful individuals. It is up to every one of us to turn who we are into our greatest asset.

Sure, it involves a lot of work. Some of the work includes deep introspection and a journey into our past. In the case of an organisation, it’s the people in the boardroom who must do the heavy lifting. It will be uncomfortable at times and challenging at others. But when the work is done, the gulf you carve between the mediocre and the brilliant will be your greatest reward.

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PS.

No LLMs were harmed in the writing of this piece. I have no issue with LLM writing, and I do use most of the tools on the market today to supplement or augment my output. But writing can be a pleasure so I keep doing it whenever I can. Just because a machine can do the job, it doesn’t mean it should. This is yet another idiosyncrasy that separates human from machine.

Modern business is almost entirely based on vestigial rules, structures that were put in place to promote maximal output of the 19th century factory. It hurts my mind to think we’re comfortable with our ontology being so outdated.

The five-day work week is one such construct, wrapped in the idea of formal management as another. This was a calibrated compromise by industrialists to allow humans to work machines non-stop without either breaking down. You needed just the right amount of rest to keep the human from collapsing and a layer of management to coordinate labour at scale.

Then, we placed value on the strong back and arms of the factory worker. Today we place an hourly value on the human mind as it sits at a desk in a specified location during a specified set of hours. To maintain this unnatural state of being, we collapsed the idea of human purpose and of production into a singular unit. We have turned production into a proxy for purpose, so that our continued motion can seem like progress.

What happens when we start to rethink this? Does the entire system collapse? Is there a way in which we can upend many established ‘truths’ without everything collapsing? The answer partly lies in turning a factory into a high-trust collective. It won’t work for everyone but it can work for some.

To do so, we examine a number of truths and reimagine them for a more dignified view of humanity.

If we decouple value from time, we stop seeing human life as part of a conveyor belt. Particularly in knowledge-based industries, a simple shift from time-based billing to value-based billing tells your team and your clients that you value the human’s ability to think and not their ability to endure hours at a desk. The four-day work week, the ‘work from anywhere’, the flat-fee for services rendered, and any other way you can think of to separate human from machine all allow for continued service and healthy billing within a more dignified framework.

The four-day week is working well for many small businesses out there (I form part of one of them) and the discussion around extending the practice is an ongoing public conversation. Value-based billing is also widespread (even if it isn’t always reflected by a lack of internal timesheets). The seeds are being sown a little erratically but with a little fine-tuning this has the potential to be a more widely adopted practice.

Civilisations were built on slavery, which gave a massive workforce at a tragic human cost. We now have machines that can do the work without the human capital. The traditional view goes back to the Industrial Revolution - how can we use machines to maximise efficiency and squeeze even more out of the human worker?

The alternative is to see the silicon brain as our natural progeny and employ it to amplify the abilities of the carbon-based human brain. The quicker we get to the very low baseline of automating administrative drudgery, the sooner we get to a point where we can focus on curiosity, empathy, and cunning strategy. And these are the most human of qualities.

We have the machines at our disposal. It is up to the business leader to channel correct implementation, prioritising augmentation over efficiency.

One of the hardest notions to upend is the idea that endless growth is an end that all business must strive for. But scale is very often a system of dilution, one accompanied by a slow drift away from principle, and a path towards more structure and discipline.

We can decouple scale from growth. The company that deliberately remains of a small size can grow in stature and positive impact, acting as a business beacon that sets the example for others to imitate. A great model is one that should inspire others to adopt the practices, so that growth happens external to the organisation without requiring it to scale operationally. We know of the small studio practice that refuses to expand for the sake of scale and to preserve the sanctity of its ethos. If it works for them it ought to be a model we can, at least partly, adopt.

Leadership is seen as a pyramid, with increasing privilege as one approaches the top. Leadership is actually the most servile of roles, one that takes on the additional burden of responsibility and added cognitive load on top of the operational tasks.

Rather than having leadership as earned automatically by seniority, leadership should be a choice made available to anyone in the organisation. Framed as an obligation, shown to be an added layer of stewardship, distributing leadership amongst the team members who want to take on the mantle makes for a more equitable and much flatter organism.

The business behaves like an organism rather than an organisation, where every organ is necessary and co-dependent. The flat organisational structure has been explored since the 1950s and implemented quite successfully. It is the kind of shift that takes time and works better as a slow transition than a sudden rupture. It could leave some people by the wayside. But it makes for exceptional internal bonds.

Power and wealth concentrate. But if we stop seeing the paradigm as an inevitability, the purpose-led business can be strengthened by distributing ownership, giving every team member skin in the game. This path does not lead to a single owner gaining significantly more wealth than the rest of the team in the short term. It does, however, lead to a more equitable distribution of power, responsibility, income, and personal fulfilment.

Employee-owned businesses exist and thrive. We worked for a client that has been employee-owned for over a century and they are thriving. The model is out there and has been repeatedly proven successful.

Reading this like a shopping list is not an encouraging approach because it does come across like a highly idealistic set of shifts in everything we ‘know’ about the way the modern business behaves. But if one were to look at every shift individually, it is easy to see how there are organisations out there that already have that shift in place.

Re-examining practices that were forged in the smelting pots of Victorian factories is a dignified practice, and this gives the business leader of today an obligation to engage in reflexive thinking. Happily, one can adopt more human-centric thinking and benefit in several ways, the key being resilience.

Removing the friction of distrust unlocks a profound level of company-wide clarity. Liberated from the imperative to police the team and manage hierarchies, the team operates out of a shared commitment to a future state every individual believes in. The first benefit is a greatly increased resilience. The team motivated by purpose and self-belief will endure significantly more than the one carried forward by implied coercion. And in the finely-tuned and critically interconnected world that our businesses are part of, where resilience has been traded for efficiency, a tiny lack of alignment can be catastrophic.

Fixing the workplace of tomorrow won’t necessarily need a revolution on a grand and visible scale. We do need more business leaders to challenge what we inherited, recognise the factory walls for what they are, and decide to build an organisation that they will be proud of.

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We must start from the foundations, and these are located in a time and a place that’s a bit removed from the place in which your business operates. It starts at home, before you’ve started to think of the operations or the product. Our highest ambition for the world, and our biggest disappointments, transcend the here and now. They are a reflection of who we are, despite the trials of a day at the office.

Picture yourself after having woken up and made a coffee. You’re standing at your window to the outside and looking out at the world. Your window is conveniently high up and with a clear view for miles. You see people going about their day. You think of what’s good and what isn’t, from your unique perspective. You think of what your highest ambition for the world would be. How would people’s lives be a bit better? What particular frustration resonates with you the most?

The likelihood is that your framing isn’t completely generic. It may start with world peace and an end to hunger but it will progress to something a bit more specific, a bit more of a daily irk or hope. I’ve worked with the leaders of a company that does high end bathrooms. When we entered this phase of the identity work, the owner of the company was very quick to come to a defined worldview. She said that the people she saw were busy and flustered and had very little time to themselves. This, she said, impacted their wellbeing. Everyone needs a space to be alone for a short while, particularly as they start their day and as they end it.

I’ve done the same with a company that makes urban outdoor furniture, the benches you sit on and the planters you see when you’re in a park or a public space. The worldview was one of a world that had become a bit lonely, because we rush about our urban spaces with little interaction, even if surrounded by thousands of people. We would be well served with a moment to linger a little longer, to sit and rest a bit as we gather our thoughts and, perhaps, share a moment with a stranger who is doing the same thing.

Both leaders had complementary, if not overlapping worldviews.

Now comes the less obvious step. If you’ve given your organisation its own seat at the table, its own identity separate from the collection of minds in the room, then you should give it its own window to look out of. Observe the world as your organisation would see it. This is especially important when there is more than one decision-maker, because individual worldviews will differ and the organisation’s worldview must be its own, distilled from but not identical to the people who lead it.

It is sufficient to see how the resilience of the organisation depends on insulating it from the complex web of individual motivations that are present when all decision-makers are in the room.

Starting with the worldview is an honest reflection of an uncomfortable realisation: the world changes but people don’t. For a few thousand years, we have shaped and reshaped the world around us but our minds, the software that runs our hardware, have not evolved. We remain motivated by the same things and scared of the same things, even if these take on different shapes.

We want to be accepted and to fit in, while simultaneously wanting to be unique and different. We want excitement and the thrill of the chase, but we also want what’s comforting and familiar. We want to form part of a community, and we also need time alone and to explore our individuality.

Our worldview is a subconscious admission of this universality. Our organisations are most successful when they align perfectly with the human condition. So, start a little before ‘why’, and you’ll get to a deeper, more honest version of your purpose.

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But organisational identity is behavioural. It determines the way that the group of individuals act as a collective. It forms, and informs, the actions and reactions of the team at every touchpoint. And the reputation of the organisation is nothing more than a sum total of these interactions.

Expecting marketing to be the point of origin for brand/identity/culture is tantamount to abdication. It is a symptom of surface-level thinking that considers operations more important than a sense of self. And it is why so many organisations find themselves stuck in a frustrating rut of fire-fighting and correction instead of clearly intentional progress.

The responsibility for an organisation’s identity resides firmly in the boardroom. The ones who wield decision-making power are the ones who determine why the business exists other than to make a profit. They are the ones who have a clear notion of the focus of the organisation and what differentiates it from all others - both of which are established by its operating principles, by its values.

Sure, a product may be considered different, and comms may have a different tone, but these are simply external expressions of the innermost beliefs of a company’s leadership. Nothing ‘just happens’, and this is intuitively understood by your market. Your product and your communication are a reflection of who you are and not what you do.

Brand communication will, eventually, be handled by the marketing department, and for this to be successful it depends on an iron-clad brief by the people who take responsibility for its outcome - the ones in the boardroom.

The decision-makers are the ones who add a seat to the boardroom table and give this seat to the organisation itself. This action is essential because it grants the organization an identity that is separate from the collection of identities around the table and this gives it agency.

Since everyone at the table is there in service of the organisation, it is their responsibility to question why the organisation exists and to determine its purpose, to understand what human need is being served and how humanity would be in a worse place should the business cease to exist.

They are also the ones who establish the core set of behavioural principles that govern the way everyone in service of the organisation acts. Beyond the baseline assumptions of integrity and professionalism, real values add a level of intrigue by giving the organisation a much more human set of traits.

Now that the seat is occupied by a complex and complete identity, it is time to bring in marketing to do the styling. What would the organisation wear? Where would it live? Who does it hang out with? Who would it pick a fight with? These are the questions that will be asked, and ably answered by your marketing team. Just don’t expect them to do a good enough job if the foundations haven’t been properly dealt with by the people at the top.

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As business leaders, we have an obligation to listen, to notice how the team is feeling, and to be aware of what’s causing the shift.

The narrative that their social feeds are pouring all over the team is a large part of the cause, feeding them an unbalanced diet of institutional failure, geopolitical instability, and erosion of social justice. The ones who are more in tune with their empathetic side are the ones who will be most impacted by this.

Sure, there’s nothing an individual can do about anything that happens on a global scale. But you can lead a room full of people who need to believe that someone in their orbit is trying to make a difference, and you can be that person.

Acknowledging the feeling of low-grade helplessness is a point of departure. We are a species that is programmed to solve problems so we do not sit well with a feeling of being powerless.

The other step is more active and long-lasting. You are offering a product or service. Someone pays for your product or service. And this forms a network of people impacted by your business activity. The smallest thing you can do to improve any aspect of this pipeline, to make the world you have an impact on a bit better, is the way you gain agency. It is the way you and your team can do the right thing and shake off the helplessness.

We are used to reading about the benefits of wellness programmes, and they all have their place. Prescribing a healthy diet and the right amount of exercise is undoubtedly a good thing for everyone. What we’re talking about, however, is intended to address the cause rather than treat the symptom.

When we engage in an activity that we know is good for others, we feel a sense of control. And when we know this activity can be exemplary to others, it adds a layer of well-earned pride. What the empathetic business leader does when faced with this reality is to identify the ways in which their organisation’s activities can have a positive effect on the part of the world they impact.

To do this, you look at your entire supply chain and identify a way that can make a material difference. Based on my experience with my own clients, the intent of every small to mid-sized business leader is a noble one. But between intent and intentionality there tends to be an execution gap.

Actions don’t need to be radical. Let’s take materials as an example. One of our clients uses slightly more costly materials because they are reclaimed and they don’t need to travel more than 100km to get to their factory. The way they price this in shares the tiny additional cost with their clients. Both manufacturer and client are happy to pay a couple of percentage points more, knowing they are making a significant difference.

Determining what you can do and what you ought to do stem from the fundamentals of your organisational identity. If you are absolutely clear about your business purpose and you operate according to a set of baked-in values, the actions you need to take will emerge as inevitable.

If you want to see how true this is, consider the reverse. Consider the antiquated model we called CSR. Companies did what they did with little regard for intent or principle. Then, they bolted on a ‘CSR programme’ that was meant to make up for their transgressions. In every case, this was not believable. It didn’t even sit well with the team because they saw it for the hypocrisy it represented. Don’t think CSR because you can do better.

Place the reason you want to be better at the centre of every decision, regardless of its scale or urgency. It turns everything you do into an action that has a positive impact. And with this in place, the team will know they are part of a slightly renegade organisation, one that could need to swim upstream as it brings about the change it knows is needed.

With the team on board, you will be surprised at the way you can achieve the unimaginable. Those empathetic humans who are paralysed by a depressing narrative will be the ones most galavanised by the prospect of making things right. And they will do the best work of their career while on your payroll.

I grew up to the narrative that the fourth estate, the press, was all that stood between us and total societal collapse. For most of human history, since we organised ourselves into groups of people who needed leadership, we outsourced that leadership to structures that were bigger than the individual.

We had religions, we had monarchies, and we had various forms of governments that seem to have settled on a version of liberal democracy. Each one failed, or is on its last legs, for a thousand variations of the same reason. They start out with the intention of doing the right thing and eventually end up optimising themselves for their own survival at all costs.

Capitalist authoritarianism in China and the US with no structural incentive to change course, Europe paralysed by bureaucracy and divided by shared interests, and the global destabilisation this leaves behind, means no one is coming to save us any time soon. Waiting for something to happen is a strategy for paralysis.

The press was a partial solution because it documented the transgressions of the ruling class. It showed when the intent was no longer fairness or human dignity. It held the elected officials to task. But, once again optimising for its own survival, the press was forced to prioritise engagement over all else and the first casualty is, as always, the truth.

There is much to say about what constitutes the truth, and I don’t want to dive into a treatise on the protracted epistemological crisis we find ourselves in, but it is worth pointing out that a lack of certainty about what the truth actually is has contributed to much of the low-grade unease that you and your teams are surely feeling.

We are a species that’s physically uneasy when facing cognitive dissonance, and being unable to trust the narratives that come our way, never mind the depressing reality of their content, places us in a constant state of dissonance.

As a business leader, you are in an interesting position. Whatever the state of the world may be, you can for a moment disassociate and see the world as one complex, interconnected mesh of transactions. Someone makes something, someone sells it, someone buys it, someone lives with the consequences. If you multiply these nodes by every transaction that happens around the globe every day, we can see the barebone skeleton of modern civilisation.

I might sound like I’m taking a rather reductionist view of the beautiful complexity of the human condition but I do so because I find this view strangely liberating. Every transaction is where our intent translates into a behaviour, where a decision we make at policy level has an impact on other humans. It is a view that gives us agency, and in a world where we feel powerless, this is a beautiful consideration.

If you are the leader of a small or a mid-sized business, you are especially powerful.

Large companies are run by leaders who are far too distanced from their teams and their clients for them to see the direct impact of their decisions. They are, like the three estates I mentioned above, now optimised for continuity and this means they must prioritise shareholder value over ethics. Principles make way for margin and there’s no returning from that position.

But the smaller business is where things really start to matter. The transactions you govern are all locations of integrity. You can decide to build a business that you would be proud to be associated with in the long term, fulfilled by the journey you have taken to get there.

This is a much smaller task than you may think it is because every small decision has a wide-reaching impact. Treating your team with dignity and respect is a baseline that is unfortunately not as widespread as you might think it is. But the businesses I’ve been working with go much further than that.

Every decision made is one that is conscious of its impact. Minimising negative impact is a very low bar, one we can leave to the oil and gas industry’s conscience. We are considering maximising the impact of a business, because as soon as it is one where it leaves a direct, positive impact, then it has an obligation to thrive.

This is a reality that is already in motion among the businesses that have figured this out. They usually just get on with doing the right thing and, inevitably, others follow. Without the need for virtue signalling, without performance or exhortation, the organisations that are rewarded for responsible behaviours find that it turns out to be a cunning strategy for talent retention, decommoditisation, and more accurate positioning.

There is also the basic arithmetic that favours this movement. There are many more small to mid-sized businesses than there are of a corporate or multi-national scale, and the transactions they govern dwarf those of the larger ones. If a fraction of them operate with intentionality the outcome will be significant.

The realities of your business are unique, and the network it is enmeshed in is particular to its circumstance. This network is your sphere of influence. It represents the humans who will benefit from the decisions you make today, provided they are decisions made with the intent of taking control and making the best of that control.

This includes your team, and they are the ones who really matter. Once they understand that their actions, no matter how small, can have a positive impact on the world around them, their perspective changes. The sense of powerlessness in the face of everything, the sense that no one seems to be doing anything with the right intent, vanishes and is replaced by a sense of agency.

Rather than seeing the four estates as having failed us, it pays to see them as having failed themselves. The scale we operate on is where the true power lies. It is up to us to weaponise concrete positive action as a form of micro-resistance. And pending a more concrete mechanism for change, we have an obligation to do our bit.

At some point in the life of every organisation, a group of clever people sits down and produces a list of meaningless words. These words, usually a combination of ‘Excellence, integrity, professionalism, innovation, client-centric…’, go onto the wall in the reception area, into an annual report, and onto the company website.

Having performed this task, they head back to work having collectively failed to do what they set out to do. There are good reasons for this failure.

For the longest time, values have been associated with ‘brand’ and brand, in turn, associated with marketing, so broadcasting a feigned ‘integrity’ is thought of as a good thing. But reminding adults not to steal, cheat, or lie is not strategic insight. These words are the basic price of doing business.

There is another reason for doing real work on establishing an organisation’s values and still ending up with a set of words or phrases that don’t run deep enough to make a difference. This is really dismaying for leaders who have done the work. They’ve put in the effort but they still have this nagging feeling that they’ve failed to capture something crucial but can’t quite put their finger on it.

Usually, this is because business leaders who care about what they’re building and running spend plenty of time within the operation itself, and this forces their thinking into a surface-level consideration of the actions of the team. Values end up being reflections of the ‘operating system’ of the company rather than belief-driven principles that guide the actions of everyone on the team.

They should be a set of principles that you abide by. They drive your behaviours because, every time you make a decision, you do so according to your ethos. If you are a principled person, you don’t reserve your principles for the time you spend interacting with clients. You are true to yourself, no matter what.

Your values should strongly influence every decision taken by every member of your team. This matters when you’re not in the room. You want your team to be able to behave in a way that’s consistent with what you believe in.

Have you ever thought: “I wish I could clone myself” when you observe the spread of decision-making abilities across your team? As a business leader, your beliefs are likely complex and multifaceted. They surely run deeper than your wish to see people act with integrity and professionalism at work. You founded your business - or perhaps joined the business you are now leading - based on a set of principles you believe in.

And in a world where the institutions we relied on have systematically drifted away from being principled, the responsible business is even more important than it’s ever been.

It takes hard work to unearth the true set of values that make your company unique, work that is well worth the effort. Real values serve an essential function: that of differentiation from the rest of the market. You’re not the only ones solving the problem that your market so desperately needs solved but you do have a way of standing out.

Let’s fast forward to the state your company is in after you’ve dug deeper, and ideally worked with someone who isn’t as steeped in the daily grind as you are.

You’ve worked really hard on determining the real set of values that underpin your organisation. You have a set of four words that don’t sound sexy but that really define the way you do absolutely everything. You have then used these words as a strict ‘hire and fire’ metric. You’ve slowly weeded out the individuals who cannot abide by your values and have only hired ones who are perfectly aligned with them.

Now, every employee can be trusted to make a call based on your core beliefs, rather than a combination of the mood they’re in and their own belief system.