Every company claims to have values. They’re printed on walls, embossed on mugs, and rehearsed in town halls as if repetition could make them real. They promise unity, integrity, courage — the usual ensemble of abstract nouns that sound good precisely because they mean nothing specific.
For a while, we all play along. It’s easier to nod than to ask what integrity looks like when the roadmap slips or how collaboration survives when incentives compete. The slogans are supposed to guide behaviour, but mostly they prescribe tone — how to appear aligned, how to sound inspired, how to pass the next performance review.
This is the paradox of enforced virtue: the more we ritualise values, the less they seem to matter. Language designed to unite ends up muting dissent. In trying to sound principled, organisations become predictable — safe, self-affirming, and strangely hollow.
Scenario: The Values Cascade
Situation
A senior product manager opens the quarterly review template and sees the familiar grid: five company values, five boxes to evidence “alignment.”
Words like Integrity, Collaboration, Courage, Excellence, and Customer First stare back — so broad they could fit any organisation on Earth.
Impact
He knows the ritual. Everyone pastes in examples to prove they’ve “lived the values.”
Nobody questions the emptiness of the exercise because to do so risks being branded “not a team player.”
In leadership decks, the same slogans headline every initiative — each claiming moral ownership of progress that never quite materialises.
Tension
What began as cultural glue now behaves like a filter.
The language of virtue has become a compliance mechanism, rewarding performance over reflection.
He can see the gap between the slogans and the system’s reality — the invisible drag where honest feedback should live — but voicing it feels like professional suicide.
Approach
He quietly adjusts course: communicates through data, skips the slogans, lets outcomes speak.
It works locally but changes nothing structurally.
The slogans persist because they’re safe; they measure belonging, not truth.
Resolution
By the next review cycle, the values cascade again from the top, unchanged.
The system still “speaks in slogans,” mistaking repetition for resonance.
Feedback has nowhere to land — only applause.
Across countless organisations, virtue has been operationalised — turned into a performance metric rather than a moral compass.
The intent was alignment; the outcome is theatre. When values become slogans and slogans become compliance, the system starts to eat its own feedback. What should be a mechanism for honesty morphs into a stage for affirmation, where everyone says the right things while the real truths circulate underground.
The Virtue Feedback Loop
Corporate values are meant to guide behaviour, yet in most organisations they function more like calibration slogans. The words echo through onboarding decks, review templates, and all-hands slides until everyone can recite them without believing them. What started as culture design becomes culture display.
From a systems perspective, this is a closed feedback loop. Each repetition reinforces belonging rather than learning; dissent is treated as a signal failure, not a system correction. When affirmation is rewarded and questioning is penalised, feedback stops circulating — the organisation hears only its own echo.
Forrester’s model of feedback loops explains this perfectly: systems that reward reinforcing feedback while damping corrective feedback eventually lose their ability to self-regulate. The values grid becomes a thermostat that can only heat, never cool. Performance reviews fill with warmth and enthusiasm even as projects slide off course.
The tragedy is that no one intends this. People cling to the language of virtue because it feels safe. But every “Integrity” badge, every “Customer First” mantra recited without friction, tightens the loop. The safer the words, the weaker the signal — and the quieter the truth.
Information Asymmetry in Culture
When the system prizes performance over feedback, language becomes a kind of currency — traded upwards for approval rather than outwards for clarity. Managers and executives set the narrative, while those closest to the work hold the inconvenient truths that rarely make it to the surface.
It’s a textbook case of information asymmetry, as George Akerlof described: one side knows more than the other, yet the flow of information is shaped by incentives rather than honesty. In markets, this creates lemons. In organisations, it creates ghosts — ideas that die quietly because they can’t find a safe route to travel.
Product managers feel this acutely. They sit at the junction where strategy meets delivery, fluent in both the slogans and the spreadsheet. They know when a KPI is theatre and when a “North Star metric” is just another constellation in the deck. But fluency comes at a price: you learn to translate truth into language that survives hierarchy.
The asymmetry is rarely malicious; it’s cultural. Leadership believes it’s communicating vision. Teams believe they’re being transparent. Yet both sides are speaking different dialects of the same corporate Esperanto — clear enough to be polite, vague enough to be safe.
The Archetype of Collapse
Every few years, the system tries to save itself with a rebrand. A new set of values, a fresh slogan, a launch video starring employees pretending to be surprised on camera. It feels like change, but it’s really maintenance — the organisational version of repainting a cracked wall instead of fixing the foundation.
Peter Senge’s systems archetypes describe this as Shifting the Burden: treating symptoms to avoid addressing causes. The symptom is “poor engagement,” so the fix is a new campaign about engagement. The deeper cause — that people stopped believing language maps to action — remains untouched. Each cycle leaves the structure a little weaker, the cynicism a little stronger.
Inside that loop, individuals learn adaptive behaviours. They whisper realism in private chats, stay silent in all-hands meetings, and craft performance updates that sound bold but say nothing. Survival depends on reading the room’s linguistic climate — on knowing when clarity will be celebrated and when it will be punished.
This is the archetype’s cruel efficiency: the system teaches its members how to keep it running, even when they know it’s broken. Everyone is doing their job; no one is doing their best work. The slogans endure because they’re easier to maintain than meaning.
Conclusion
Systems that depend on individual bravery to surface truth are already failing. The fix isn’t another slogan about “open culture,” but the quiet engineering of transparency into process — feedback as infrastructure, not performance.
That means changing what gets rewarded. Not the frequency of updates, but the fidelity of signal. Not enthusiasm in retros, but evidence of learning. The organisation must make it easier to tell the truth than it is to tell the story.
Transparency protocols don’t need to be radical; they need to be real. Publish decisions alongside their rationale. Close the loop when feedback is given. Track what was heard, not just what was said. When communication becomes auditable rather than aspirational, trust starts to behave like data — measurable, traceable, renewable.
Because the opposite of secrecy isn’t exposure; it’s clarity. And when systems stop speaking in slogans, feedback lives again.
Behavioural Principles
Virtue without Friction
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Virtue becomes vanity
When values are performed rather than practiced, culture becomes choreography. -
Feedback dies in comfort
Systems that reward politeness over precision trade honesty for harmony. -
Compliance masquerades as conviction
The language of belonging often hides the fear of exclusion. -
Clarity is a design choice
Honesty should flow by default, not rely on personal bravery. -
Transparency is the new trust
Build protocols that make truth automatic, not optional. -
Silence isn’t loyalty
It’s the by-product of systems that punish the signal and praise the noise.
