Start With Reality, Not Why
Why “Start With Why” became one of the most dangerous ideas in modern management.
Every organisation now has a purpose statement. A soothing narrative that helps leaders feel they are doing strategy, while avoiding the hard work strategy actually demands.
These statements are framed as moral anchors and strategic north stars. The language is always some variation of: helping people prosper, serving communities, reimagining the future, enabling the planet to thrive.
On paper, it looks like progress. In practice, it has become one of the biggest sources of cynicism in organisational life, and the myth is now unravelling. The gap between words and reality is growing too wide to ignore.
The problem is simple. These statements rarely describe what the organisation actually does. They describe what leaders wish it were, or what marketing thinks will play well with stakeholders. When people see that gap every day, it does not inspire them. It teaches them not to take anything the organisation says too seriously.
This gap has real consequences. It shows up as failed transformations, confused priorities, reputational damage, and internal distrust. When purpose statements detach from behaviour, leaders stop getting honest signals from the organisation. Strategy becomes harder, not easier.
This is not just a communications problem; it is a strategy problem. Purpose has been mistaken for strategy, and “why” has replaced reality as the starting point for thinking.
If we want organisations with any real coherence, we need to stop starting with “why” and start with what is.
Three cases that expose the purpose–reality gap
Case 1: Lloyds Banking Group – “Help Britain prosper”
Lloyds Banking Group’s purpose is printed everywhere:
“Help Britain prosper.”
It is tied to their strategy, their ESG narrative, and their internal messaging about culture and values.
At the same time, Lloyds has been restructuring its technology and data functions. In 2024–25, it began building a large tech hub in India, with plans for around 4,000 roles there, while putting thousands of UK technology staff through re-selection processes and job cuts.
From a narrow financial perspective, this is understandable. Labour arbitrage and restructuring to reduce costs and increase margins are standard big-bank behaviour.
From a “Help Britain prosper” perspective, it is harder to reconcile. You cannot plaster that line across your employer brand and public reporting, then quietly export skilled work out of Britain and expect people not to notice the contradiction.
This is where POSIWID cuts through:
The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does.
If a bank consistently prioritises cost reduction and offshoring in its decisions, then whatever it says, that is its real purpose in practice. The declared “why” is a story layered on top.
People inside see it instantly. Purpose becomes performance, not orientation.
Consequence: When narrative and manoeuvre diverge this sharply, the organisation loses coherence and leaders lose the ability to influence real behaviour.
Case 2: Thames Water – “So customers, communities and the environment can thrive”
Thames Water’s published purpose is:
“To deliver life’s essential service so our customers, communities and the environment can thrive.”
The language is full of environmental responsibility and social value. They explicitly claim that supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals is “part of what we do every day”.
Now hold that against the record.
Thames Water has become the emblem of a failing model. It carries around £17 billion of debt, faces public backlash, and is the subject of rescue plans that would allow years of leniency on pollution rules to avoid collapse.
In May 2025, Ofwat fined Thames Water £122.7 million following investigations into its wastewater operations and illegal discharges.
Communities along the Thames and its tributaries have launched coordinated legal complaints over sewage pollution, citing raw sewage discharges, E. coli levels dozens of times above safe limits, and health impacts on children and local businesses.
Again, this is not about demonising one company. It is about taking their own words seriously and comparing them with observable behaviour.
If a water company:
is heavily leveraged
repeatedly pollutes rivers
fails to upgrade ageing infrastructure
Then its real purpose is not enabling communities and environments to thrive. It is servicing debt and keeping a failing system minimally viable.
POSIWID again. Purpose is what the system does, not what the PowerPoint says.
Consequence: The more behaviour contradicts the story, the more identity collapses into crisis management. Strategy becomes reactive. The organisation loses any stable sense of itself.
Case 3: BP – “Reimagining energy for people and our planet”
BP’s declared purpose is:
“Reimagining energy for people and our planet.”
For a time, this came with aggressive transition language: net zero by 2050, large cuts in oil and gas production, and big investments in renewables and low-carbon businesses.
The story was clear. BP was transforming from an international oil company into an integrated energy company, leading the energy transition.
Then reality reasserted itself.
In early 2025, BP announced a strategic shift to increase annual oil and gas investment to around 10 billion dollars, while cutting planned investment in renewables and transition businesses by more than 5 billion dollars compared to earlier projections. The company is now targeting higher upstream production by 2030 than previously indicated.
Again, this is not shocking. BP is doing what a listed energy major does under shareholder and market pressure: maximising value from hydrocarbons while adjusting its transition narrative.
But it shows the same pattern. The stated purpose suggests one trajectory. The capital allocation says something else. When those diverge, POSIWID tells you which to believe.
Consequence: When capital contradicts narrative, external trust collapses — and internal trust collapses faster. Nothing corrodes coherence more quickly.
A simple way to test your own organisation
If your purpose is real, you will see it in three places:
The budget — what you spend on, not what you say you value
Constraints — what you refuse to do, even under pressure
Repeated behaviour — the consistent pattern across time
If you can’t find it in these three places, it isn’t purpose. It’s fiction.
Why this matters: purpose as a strategy artefact
In all three examples, the purpose statement functions as a strategy artefact. It is used to signal direction, ethics and social contribution. It appears in strategy decks, ESG reports, culture programmes and external communications.
Yet in none of these cases does the purpose statement reliably describe the organisation’s behaviour. That is why people inside these organisations become cynical. They are asked to treat the purpose as a north star, while living with decisions that clearly point elsewhere.
This dissonance erodes coherence. When the story and the behaviour diverge, people stop trusting leadership direction. Teams disengage from strategy processes. Decisions become more political, less principled. And the organisation loses its ability to see itself accurately — the first step toward losing viability.
The issue is not that aspiration is bad. The issue is that aspiration is detached.
Most organisations today try to change who they are without earning that change through interaction with the external environment. They rewrite the words and expect the identity to follow.
It does not work like that.
Grand strategy: identity that has been earned
Grand strategy is the organisation’s enduring identity. It is not a slogan. It is not “purpose wording”. It is:
who you fundamentally are
the deep commitments you keep making
the principles/policies you are willing to pay for
the ethics you refuse to trade away
the position you occupy in your ecosystem
In Viable System Model terms, this is System 5: the identity and ethos that set the ultimate bounds of what the organisation will and will not become.
Grand strategy:
anchors principles in reality
sets minimum viable ethics
provides coherence between intent and action
prevents drift into pathology under pressure
A useful way to say it:
Grand strategy is enduring identity, ethos and enabling constraints.
Grand strategy answers who we fundamentally are. Strategy answers how and where we move now. The two are linked, but not interchangeable: identity changes slowly, strategy changes through action.
It is the stable orientation, not the next initiative. And crucially, you do not redesign it every year. You do not declare a new identity at every strategy offsite.
Identity is earned. It emerges from repeated interaction with the environment.
If you want to change who you are as an organisation, you have to earn that change over time, through the strategies you actually pursue and the moves you actually make.
Strategy: how identity changes in practice
Strategy is not the glossy document that sits next to the purpose slide. It is the pattern of adaptive manoeuvres you take now to stay viable in a world that does not care about your plans.
A good working definition:
Strategy is the ongoing act of orientation — how an organisation continuously interprets, adapts, and acts within its environment to sustain advantage and maintain viability.
Strategy is not a plan. It is a disciplined way of staying in touch with reality: sensing shifts, adjusting posture, testing moves, and continually re-orienting as conditions change.
It works through:
Explorations: small experiments that test the environment and show how it responds.
Trajectories: directions of movement rather than fixed end states
Affordances: what the environment is making possible right now
Constraints: what you choose to enforce to keep the organisation viable and ethical
Strategy does not live in aspirational end-states. It lives in the next move, and the one after that.
Grand strategy sets the enduring orientation. Strategy shapes the trajectories that keep you viable within it.
Over time, if your strategies are coherent, they will gradually alter your grand strategy. That is how identity genuinely changes: not by rewriting the words, but by altering the pattern of action.
How “Start With Why” made all this worse
This is why I see Start With Why as so damaging.
It told leaders that the starting point is an inspiring purpose. Get the “why” right and everything else follows. That is backwards.
Purpose, in the sense that actually matters, is not a starting point. It is a description of what the organisation has become through repeated interaction with its environment.
When leaders start with an idealised future and a crafted “why”, three things happen:
They become aspirationally detached. The organisation’s story drifts away from its actual behaviour.
They narrow their memory of the future. They lock onto a single imagined trajectory and stop seeing what the present is already affording them.
They neglect orientation. Instead of widening perception, they project intention onto the environment and then try to drag the organisation toward that projection.
And most dangerously:
It trains leaders to anchor strategy in fiction — narratives that feel good but do not reflect the terrain the organisation is standing on.
Time and again, I see organisations so fixated on an idealised future state that they miss the adjacent possibilities right in front of them. They ignore cues that do not fit the narrative. They miss shifts in power, tempo and constraint because they are busy rehearsing the story.
They are working for the slide deck, not the situation.
Start with reality, not why
If purpose statements are making your people cynical, it is not because they hate meaning. It is because they hate being lied to, even unintentionally.
The way forward is not better slogans. It is better contact with reality.
Start with:
What the organisation actually does, not what it says it does.
What the environment is actually doing, not what you hoped it would do.
What is currently afforded to you, not the fantasy end-state.
What you are structurally capable of changing now, not what would look good in a report.
From there, you can begin to see your real grand strategy: the identity and ethos that have been earned so far. You may not like all of it. That is the point. It gives you something real to work with.
Then you can design strategy as manoeuvre: specific, testable moves that shift dispositions, open new affordances and, over time, genuinely change who you are.
Identity follows action. Action follows orientation. And orientation follows reality. If leaders get the sequence wrong, everything else becomes noise.
Purpose in that context is no longer a fabrication. It is a description of a system whose purpose is visible in what it consistently does.
That is the only kind of purpose worth having.
If this resonates and you want support sharpening strategy and restoring coherence, get in touch
