Governance is the New Ethics, and Structure is the New Strategy.
Photo: Krakograff
I’ve been noticing something that keeps surfacing in my work. It shows up when I’m designing governance with teams, when I’m talking with founders who really do want to build something better, and honestly, whenever I see yet another “values-driven” or “community-first” announcement float across my screen.
It’s this simple, frustrating pattern:
The language of transformation almost always shows up long before the structures that would make it real.
We hear words like community, connection, belonging, purpose, sovereignty, stewardship. They’re used with sincerity – or at least with the desire to sound sincere. But slowly, quietly, these same words get absorbed back into the very systems they were supposed to change.
Once that happens, the words get safer. Safer becomes emptier, and emptier becomes extremely easy to commercialize.
The Structural Slight of Hand
I don’t think most people set out to hollow things out. It’s just that our institutions and business models aren’t built to redistribute power – they’re built to protect it.
It’s always:
- Easier to bolt on a feature than shift accountability.
- Easier to launch a program than move ownership.
- Easier to create a framework than sit with the discomfort of shared governance.
- Easier to declare values than to let those values cost anything.
So we end up with values that were meant to be lived collectively getting repackaged as things you can configure, buy, or subscribe to. It’s a kind of structural slight of hand.
And once you see it, it’s hard to unsee:
- Digital transformation that never touches decision rights.
- Ethical tech built on the same extractive incentives.
- “Community” strategies with no actual community power.
- Alternative ownership models that quietly replicate the same hierarchy in softer colours.
Language Isn’t the Commitment. Structure Is.
Here’s what keeps landing for me: language isn’t the commitment. Structure is.
You can say you’re community-owned, but if control hasn’t moved, it’s not ownership. You can say you’re sovereign, but if power is still upstream, it’s not sovereignty. You can say you’re values-led, but if decisions don’t change, it’s just branding.
This is something the B Corp movement, for instance, gets right in theory but still struggles with in practice. Values can’t exist in a vacuum – they have to be operationalized. You can’t preach stakeholder value if your governance, incentives, and accountability mechanisms still behave like traditional shareholder systems.
Impact isn’t a “vibe”, it’s a set of choices. And those choices live in structure.
The irony is that many of the words we’re not repackaging originated in communities who learned the hard way – through practice, not promotion. If we want to honour that lineage, we have to slow down and ask harder questions:
Who actually holds power here?
Who feels the consequences?
What happens when there’s conflict?
What’s structural? What’s symbolic?
What are we willing to give up for this to be true?
I’m drawn to models where the answers aren’t cosmetic. Where governance isn’t a footnote. Where “community” isn’t a function, and where “purpose” isn’t a positioning strategy.
Not because it’s neat or perfectly scalable, but because it’s real – and real is the true foundation of trust.
I’m not offering a tidy solution, just a reminder to myself (and maybe to anyone else trying to build something that won’t collapse under it’s own rhetoric) that values only mean something when they’re backed by structure. And structure requires trade-offs – it means someone has to give something up.
If we’re not willing to do that, everything drifts back into performance. And we deserve better than that.
My advice? If you’re ready to move past performance, look to the architects who are already designing these structures.
Ready to Move Past Performance?
If you are looking for examples of organizations where structure is the commitment, look to the architects who are already designing these models:
- Steward Ownership: Structures like the Perpetual Purpose Trust legally lock a company's mission and prevent it from being sold for private gain. You can explore the framework at the Purpose Foundation.
- Platform Cooperativism: This model applies collective ownership and democratic governance to the digital realm, putting workers and users ahead of venture capital. The Platform Cooperativism Consortium is a global hub for this movement.
- Next Economy Builders: For guidance and a portfolio of companies committed to these structural shifts, look to organizations like Lift Economy.
- Deep Dive: For a concise breakdown of the core principles – self-governance and purpose-driven profit – read this summary of Steward Ownership Explained.