The Une, Weekly #3 — The Compass

Hi there, welcome to The Une. This week we look at why an inner compass is essential for navigating an outer world that won't hold still. No matter how much we want to, it just won't. Hold. Still.

When everything is possible, what is the right thing to do?
When everything changes, what will tomorrow look like?
When everything is connected, where do we start?

We look around us for clarity, trying to paint a picture of reality we can rely on, so we can make plans, set goals and move forward.

But this is increasingly harder to do. The outside world is giving less and less guidance for how to act. For that we need to go inside.

In this third newsletter we explore why, instead of constantly redrawing the map of the changing world around us, having a clear inner compass is a more effective way to know what direction to go.

The leader's job
The job that's getting harder.

A leader is always expected to hold two worlds at once: the world outside — what is changing, what is being demanded, what the future might require — and the world inside — what the organisation stands for, what it is capable of, what it is here to do. Making sense of where they meet, what that means, and inspiring people to act accordingly, is getting harder.

The outside world moves fast. Organisations have grown complex. Even when your vision is clear, how does it reliably travel from where it was made all the way into the decisions being taken every day?

How do we keep everyone together and inspired to act in the right way?
How do we give them direction when the context keeps changing?

More planning isn't the answer
In a 2024–2025 survey of 416 senior executives, McKinsey found that only 21% reported their strategies passed basic quality tests — a 40% drop from fifteen years earlier. The biggest gap between high-performing organisations and the rest was not in making strategic choices, but in mobilisation: translating those choices into shared direction and action across the organisation.

There is a human cost to that gap. Only 46% of employees strongly agree they know what is expected of them at work — down from 56% in 2020. Without clear direction, engagement and morale suffer directly.

More plans don't work. Plans assume a future that holds still long enough to be executed.
That is not the world we live in today. More scenarios, governance, goals?
Only adding to complexity. Not clarity.

So what does?

Principles
Buurtzorg — Dutch for "neighbourhood care" — is a home-care organisation founded in 2006 by Jos de Blok. He started it out of frustration with exactly the problem we're describing: a system so focused on rules, targets, and management layers that the actual purpose of the work had become impossible to act on.

His answer was radical simplification — not with plans, but with a clearer principle: Put the patient at the centre, and trust the nurses closest to the work to decide how.

Instead of giving nurses a plan, he gave them principles clear enough to make decisions without one.

Most of you are probably familiair with this case. The approach and success of Buurtzorg has made it into many books, keynotes and opinion pieces.

To us it's a perfect example of the logic behind the principles that make up a Value Compass.

The Value Compass
A map tells you what the terrain looks like. A compass tells you which direction to go, so wherever you find yourself, you know how to orient. Even when the terrain changes.

The Value Compass consists of a shared, explicit definition of the value the organisation is here to create — commercially, socially, and ecologically — expressed in principles that can actually guide a real decision.

In our approach, commercial, social and ecological value aren't three separate agendas. They're one.

Commercial value doesn't exist without the community that buys, the people who work, and the natural systems that supply. Social value doesn't hold without the economic viability to sustain it. Ecological health is the ground everything else stands on.

A compass without all three directions doesn't point north. We're lost. Even if we don't notice it immediately. But when all three are present, trade-offs become visible. Decisions become more deliberate.

Everyone in the organisation understands not just what is being built, but why it matters. The value they create together.

Values = Value = Relationships
It's helpful to understand what we mean by value — because it changes how you see the compass.

Most organisations treat values and value as two separate concerns.

Values belong to culture: the things you put on the wall, the commitments you make in the annual report.
Part of our ethics.

Value belongs to economics: revenue, growth, return.
Part of our economics.

They exist in parallel. Occasionally we check if they need to be balanced.
Often we don't. This is the result.

In reality, they're the same thing, seen from different angles. And at their essence, they are relational.
Your feet don't have value in isolation. They have value because there is ground to walk on.

Value is never located purely in the object, and never purely in the subject.
It emerges in the relationship between the two.

This is how markets already work: something is worth what someone will pay. Value arises between what is offered and what is needed. But extract value without sustaining those relationships, and you deplete the very thing making it possible.

Values are what sustain them. Honesty, care, integrity — the logic that determines how value gets created. Without them, the transaction either fails or becomes extraction.

The split between value and values might have been a convenient vocabulary to pretend this wasn't so, but it doesn't change what is actually happening.

This is why we have come to the following definition:

Value is what emerges from relationships that are worth sustaining.
Values are what make those relationships worth sustaining.

The principles we apply to make this possible act as our compass.

Why we call it an intent
At the heart of every Value Compass is a Unifying Intent.

It unites the value principles through a description of what you're fundamentally trying to bring into being — the transformation you're here to make. It comes from within, and it doesn't expire when the plan changes. It doesn't need a stable future to stay useful. It can travel into every decision. In the meeting room, the budget conversation, the moment someone has to choose.

It's the phrase from which all three value principles can be derived.
The phrase that tells an outsider immediately what kind of organisation this is.

The orientation of the organisation.

Your compass
A Value Compass isn't about adding ethics to strategy. It is the strategy. If you want to explore what that could look like for your organisation, we're running Value Design workshops this summer.

👋 hello@une.eco

Move as one. For the benefit of all. — Laurens & Jorn