The Une, Weekly #7 — The Reality
Hi there, welcome to The Une, Weekly #7. |
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The Illusion
When it comes to the kind of social and ecological value we create, we all move somewhere on a scale between super positive and really bad. A company that only counts commercial value isn't not impacting the other two. It's just ignoring them. Living an illusion.
Communities, ecosystems, the future: they’re affected by your activities, even when we look away. Pretending we don't make that impact doesn't change the fact we do.
So the choice isn’t whether to create social and ecological value, but whether we do it intentionally, instead of by accident.
The Reality
There is no alternative.
We all depend on the same systems. No company exists outside the communities it draws talent and customers from, or the ecosystems that provide the materials and stability. We’re in a constant relationship with our environment. The quality of that relationship is essential for the health of both sides.
When commercial value is the only thing we optimise for, when social value gets framed as reputation, and ecological value as compliance, we are stimulating disconnection and disengagement that simply won’t hold.
We can offload the harm across place, across time, across society, but one day we won’t be able to escape it.
Our Move-as-one intent is the recognition that we can't keep externalising onto the systems we depend on.
We need to intentionally include them in the value we create.
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The Pay-off
For companies it may be counter-intuitive, but the most values-driven ones actually create the most value — including the commercial kind. It's in the numbers:
Firms of Endearment tracked 18 purpose-driven companies over a decade and found they outperformed the S&P 500 by roughly 10 to 1.
Companies that both clearly define and actively act on their corporate purpose outperform the financial markets by 42%.
CECP found high-purpose companies posted ~14% higher revenue growth.
And there many more. Worth noting: the studies measure "purpose" loosely. That's part of why the word has lost its edge. We decided not to use it in our vocabulary.
The Intent
A dear friend recently wrote: “For me, purpose is whatever emerges from a point of coherence. Return to that point, and the question of purpose begins to dissolve.”
He made a good point. Purpose has become a management tool for meaning-faking making in organisations. Of course there are lots of great companies doing truly purposeful work. But often it's just words. Values have the same problem — they stay abstract until they're tied to action. Purpose as something that emerges from what you do makes more sense than purpose as an aspiration far in the future.
We choose to put a transformative principle at the heart of the value compass. A unifying intent that integrates commercial, social and ecological value creation by expressing the transformation an organisation is actively striving to make. From it, all three value principles can actually be derived.
The Unifying Intent works at the scale of a single decision as naturally as a strategic one. A purpose inspires; an intent directs. Not the destination. The compass.
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The Fruitful Tension
The real work, and the tasty fruit, lives in the tension between the commercial, social and ecological value principles. This is exactly the part that's easy to skip and that has been engineered out of organisations.
Multiple value creation isn't about balance for its own sake, or three boxes ticked. The three domains can pull against each other, creating a healthy tension. The friction at the moment a trade-off arises and is held surfaced rather than externalised is gold. That's what forces the creativity, deepens the connection, and ultimately makes the whole thing more valuable.
A system that optimises one domain is efficient yet fragile. A system that holds all three in tension is alive, creative, and, indeed, purposeful.
This is why we founded Une. To get more organisations to move as one, to multiple value creation — intentionally. What should make it easy is this: the organisations that hold all three values in tension are the ones that bring the most prosperity to both sides of the relation: they make the world genuinely better, and benefit from that themselves as well.
Move as one. For the benefit of all. — Laurens & Jorn 👋 hello@une.eco