The symptom
Consider an organisation with four stated values, well known enough that staff can name all four unprompted. Ask for an example of a decision one of them changed, and answers get vague fast. The values are not controversial. Nobody disputes them. They simply don’t seem to be doing anything. This is a familiar and specific kind of gap: not disagreement with the values, not ignorance of them, but an inability to connect them to anything concrete that has actually happened.
What leaders usually conclude
The instinctive read is that the values themselves are the problem — too generic, too aspirational, insufficiently specific to guide real choices. That diagnosis usually leads to a rewording exercise: sharper language, more concrete phrasing, perhaps a workshop to make them “live.” The underlying assumption is that better language would produce better recall of examples, which treats the absence of examples as a communication failure rather than as a fact about how the organisation actually makes decisions.
What the evidence suggests
The wording is rarely the actual issue. No decision process in the organisation references the stated values; no review asks whether a choice was consistent with them; no visible decision has ever been publicly explained by appeal to one. The values are reasonable as written. They are simply never invoked at the point where a real choice is being made.
This matches a pattern Steven Kerr, then at City University of New York and later at General Electric, documented across manufacturing, insurance, and settings well beyond business — including politics and medicine. Kerr’s core finding was that people learn what is actually rewarded and orient toward that, regardless of what is officially hoped for. As he put it, most people “seek information concerning what activities are rewarded, and then seek to do… those things, often to the virtual exclusion of activities not rewarded.” A value that is never consulted when a real trade-off is being decided is, functionally, not part of the reward structure — no matter how sincerely it is held or how often it is repeated. It costs nothing to violate and therefore decides nothing.
There is a second layer worth adding. Larry Greiner’s research on organisational growth describes how informal understanding — the kind that lets a small team apply shared values instinctively, without anyone needing to write them down or check them — becomes harder to sustain as headcount and distance between decision-makers increase. In a small organisation, values might genuinely function through everyday modelling: people watch what a founder actually does and absorb the pattern. That mechanism does not scale automatically. As an organisation grows, either the values get built into the structures that decide things — hiring criteria, review templates, escalation questions — or they quietly become descriptive language, present but doing no work, exactly because the informal mechanism that used to carry them has stopped reaching everyone.
This produces a specific kind of organisational blind spot. Because the values are never contradicted — nobody makes a decision that visibly violates them, precisely because nobody consults them either way — there is no obvious moment that would prompt anyone to notice the gap. A value that were actively broken would draw attention. A value that is simply never invoked draws none, and can persist in that state indefinitely, recited confidently at every induction while genuinely deciding nothing.
Competing explanations
It is worth holding two explanations alongside each other rather than collapsing them into one. The wording-is-wrong explanation is sometimes correct — some stated values genuinely are too vague to apply to anything, and no amount of embedding them in decision processes would change that. But the evidence suggests a second, more common pattern: values that are clear enough as written, and simply never connected to anything a decision-maker is actually required to consider. The two produce identical surface symptoms — recitable values, no examples — but point toward very different diagnostic questions. Testing which applies is less about asking whether the wording is good and more about asking whether any specific, real decision in the last year would plausibly have gone differently had the value been consulted. If the honest answer is that none would have, the wording is very unlikely to be the primary issue.
For how this pattern presents in other kinds of organisation, see other sectors.
Questions worth considering
- When did a stated value last make a decision measurably harder, rather than simply confirming what was already going to happen?
- Does anything in the organisation’s actual decision process — not its induction materials — ever reference the values directly?
- If the values were only decided by what gets rewarded, would today’s four survive?
- Who, if anyone, would notice if a value were quietly dropped from the list — and what would that tell the organisation about what the value was actually doing?
More on this topic: Leadership.
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