Archives for April 2025

The Dance Between Personal and Organisational Ethics

In contemporary organisational life, values have become a kind of currency, to be printed on mission statements, vinyls stuck on to walls, and voiced confidently at induction days. Yet, behind this rhetorical familiarity lies a more complex, unresolved question:

What are values, and how do they operate in the interplay between personal conscience and institutional identity?

To explore this, we might begin by asking: are values like clothes, chosen to suit a setting, or are they closer to a second skin, inseparable from the self, enduring across time and place?

Or perhaps they are something stranger still: half-inherited, half-chosen, and only truly revealed and strengthened in the tension between conviction and circumstance.

The Illusion of Fixed Values

Much of modern leadership discourse assumes that values can be fixed, coherent, and transferable. We’re told that individuals should be “values-led” and that organisations ought to “live their values.” Yet this assumption often masks a deeper truth: values are not stable possessions but are better understood as living commitments that emerge through relation and context. As Charles Taylor (1989) notes, values are embedded in “webs of significance,” always interpreted through cultural and historical lenses.

What’s more, the idea that values can be universally codified, immutable across time, place, or person, can be more coercive than clarifying.

When organisations articulate a set of ‘core values’ as non-negotiable, they risk substituting conformity for integrity. This creates a culture where people wear values like uniforms, suppressing the dissonance that might otherwise lead to growth, questioning, or innovation.

Conformity or Plurality?

This raises a second question: do we really want everyone in an organisation to share the same values? At first glance, the answer seems obvious; surely alignment makes for harmony. But such harmony is often achieved at the cost of diversity, creativity, and ethical depth. Iris Marion Young (1990) warns against what she calls the “ideal of impartiality,” which smooths over difference and silences dissent in the name of common purpose.

Values pluralism, on the other hand, recognises that different people may hold divergent but equally valid commitments. Rather than seeking uniformity, organisations might do better to foster ethical dialogue, a space where conflicting values can be explored without fear. This calls for what Joan Tronto (1993) names as an “ethic of care,” rooted not in abstraction but in attentiveness, responsibility, and responsiveness to others in specific contexts.

Organisational Culture in an Era of Polarisation

These questions become even more urgent at a time when social and political values are increasingly polarised. Whether in debates over immigration, climate policy, or the role of the state, we see a rising tension between values of individualism and selflessness, liberty and security, progress and tradition. Organisations do not exist outside these debates; they are implicated in them, both as actors and as communities of meaning.

In such a landscape, the temptation is to double down on values as boundary-markers, signalling virtue or allegiance. Yet a wiser response might involve cultivating values not as fixed identity claims but as evolving practices of relational negotiation. Values such as honesty, care, courage, and justice are not simply asserted; they are enacted in and through the messiness of lived organisational life.

A Practice-Based View of Values

Perhaps then, values are less like clothes and more like musical instruments: tools of expression that require tuning, care, and skilled use. This analogy invites a shift from “value alignment” to “value attunement”, not everyone playing the same note, but listening closely enough to play in harmony. Minor keys only serving to deepen the melody. Such a shift echoes Alfred North Whitehead’s (1929) process view of reality, in which coherence is not imposed from above but arises through ongoing patterns of relating and becoming.

For leaders and organisations alike, this means resisting the lure of simplistic value statements. Instead, they must foster reflective practice, story-sharing, and the kind of dialogue that welcomes friction as a site of ethical discovery. As values continue to shift across the wider culture, organisations that can live with complexity, rather than retreating into dogma, may be the ones best equipped to contribute meaningfully to the common good.

Conclusion: Living Values Together

Values, then, are not scripts to be memorised or costumes to be worn. They are the living expressions of what we care about, emerging at the intersection of self, other, and world. To ask people to abandon their personal values for the sake of organisational alignment is both ethically suspect and strategically shortsighted. And yet, to ignore the shared values that can bind communities together is equally dangerous.

The challenge is to create organisations that are less like factories of sameness and more like ecosystems of ethical practice, spaces where values are neither imposed nor hidden, but continually explored, negotiated, and lived. In such a space, care might take precedence over compliance, and integrity might mean not agreement, but the capacity to remain in relationship across difference.

References

Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tronto, J. (1993). Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge.

Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and Reality. New York: Macmillan.

Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Donald Trump remains one of the most divisive figures in global public life. For some, he is a truth-telling outsider who challenges elite hypocrisy; for others, a dangerous narcissist whose disregard for truth, decency, and democratic norms undermines the very fabric of civic life. But rather than rehash familiar condemnations or rally around partisan affirmations, we might ask more difficult, potentially healing questions:

What kind of inner world produces such a person, and how might we respond from a place of care rather than condemnation?

What kind of society elects such a person as its leader?

To look for clues, I turn to two frameworks: personal construct psychology (Kelly, 1955) and the ethic of care (Gilligan, 1982; Noddings, 1984; Tronto, 1993). Together, they help me interpret Trump’s behaviour not merely as aberrant, but as the outcome of a particular configuration of personal meaning, and to consider a form of resistance that retains ethical integrity.

The Winner-Loser Binary: A Core Construct

At the centre of Trump’s personality appears to be a rigid binary construct: “winner vs. loser.” This is not just rhetorical flourish, it functions as a core psychological filter through which people, situations, and events are understood and evaluated. And in which identity as ‘a winner’ must be conserved. In business, golf, media, politics, and even family life, success and dominance are equated by Trump with worth, and loss or compromise with irrelevance or contempt. And when there is a loss, it is portrayed as a ‘steal’.

Personal construct psychology, developed by George Kelly, helps us see how such binaries operate. We do not simply observe reality; we interpret it through personal templates and filters shaped by past experiences. If Trump’s formative world taught him that only the dominant survive, then his worldview, however distasteful or destructive to others, has internal coherence. It explains his allergy to humility, his need for applause, and his inability to accept defeat without declaring fraud.

Business Failures, Risk-Taking, and Narrative Control

Trump’s business record is strewn with failed ventures, multiple bankruptcies, lawsuits, unpaid workers, and exaggerated claims. Yet these rarely damage his self-image or standing with loyal supporters. He reframes failures as strategic exits, deflects blame onto others, and doubles down on grandiosity.

This is what Kelly calls “construct protection“: the re-making of events to preserve the integrity of core meanings. In Trump’s case, the identity of “winner” must be protected at all costs, even if that means denying apparently obvious facts. And from within that system, truth is always subordinate to controlling the narrative.

His high tolerance for risk, legal, financial, sexual, political, is also shaped by this construct system. Risk-taking, even cheating, can be interpreted as strength, cleverness, or dominance. In such a worldview, ethical boundaries are soft, non-existent, or invisible, if crossing them reinforces self-image.

Sexual Promiscuity and the Politics of Entitlement

Trump’s sexual conduct, his affairs, boastful misogyny, and serial objectification of women, cannot be dismissed as merely private matters.

They reflect more than mere libido. They suggest a worldview in which other people, especially women, exist as instruments of gratification and affirmation. The pursuit of sexual conquest becomes another arena for dominance, a performance of virility and power, tinged with risk and reward. Those harmed by it are made invisible.

This is not incidental to Trump’s political ethos; it mirrors it. In both realms, the ethic is not mutuality but utility. What use is this?

What Kind of Ethics Are at Work?

The ethics at play in Trump’s world are perhaps best described as utilitarian self-centredness with a Darwinian accent. There is little sense of moral responsibility beyond the self, and no ethic of interdependence. This worldview celebrates not virtue but efficacy; the ability to win, persuade, extract, or dominate.

This is an ethic in which cheating is clever, truth is flexible, loyalty is instrumental, and empathy is weakness. It is amoral, structured by spectacle and driven by survival.

Attending with Care: A Difficult Discipline

How should we respond to this?

Not with indulgence. Trump has done harm, and care does not mean looking away. But nor should we respond with scorn or dehumanisation. An ethic of care begins not with outrage but with attentiveness.

• What is this person defending?
• What fear lies beneath this performance?
• What relational wound cries out through these public acts?

Care, as Tronto reminds us, is a political practice rooted in moral clarity. It is not naïve. But it refuses to surrender to cynicism. It holds the tension between accountability and empathy.

The Trump in All of Us

To speak meaningfully about Donald Trump requires more than analysis. It requires self-examination. His prominence may reflect not just a cultural sickness, but a psychic one, a shadow made visible.

• Where do we ourselves cling to power, status, or control?
• Where do we treat others as means to ends?
• Where do we fear irrelevance, shame, or failure?

Trump does not arise from a vacuum. He is a projection of something latent in the culture, something latent in all of us, perhaps?

Resisting Trumpism is not just a political act, it is a spiritual one. It asks us to do our own inner work, to resist the binaries and ego-structures that shape us too. To meet force not with force, but with a stronger fidelity to truth, humility, and relationality.

Other Ways of Seeing: From Myth to Metaphysics

Trump may also be seen mythically, as a figure not merely of politics but of archetype. He resembles the Trickster of mythology: disruptive, rule-breaking, both generative and dangerous. Like Hermes or Loki, he reveals what polite society hides.

From a Jungian perspective, Trump might represent a collective shadow, a figure who externalises our cultural fears, disowned desires, and unintegrated drives. He carries our daemonic energy, but unredeemed unabsorbed.

From a process philosophy lens Trump represents a resistance to relational becoming. Where process thinkers see reality as interwoven, dynamic, and co-creative, Trump stands for stasis, control, and separation. MAGA longs not for a future of emergence, but a return to an imagined past of dominance and simplicity.

To deepen our response, then, is to enter these alternative logics, not merely to diagnose, but to see differently. To resist not only what Trump does, but what Trump means, in myth, in psyche, in system.

Conclusion: A Different Kind of Strength

To be Donald Trump, it seems, is to live inside a fortress of constructs;

• winner vs. loser,
• strong vs. weak,
• loyal vs. disloyal.

These protect a self that cannot risk doubt, vulnerability, or interdependence. Yet in defending this self, Trump closes off the very qualities, love, truth, connection, that make life meaningful.

But Trump is also a mirror. He reveals the shadow of a culture built on performance and power. He shows us what happens when we lose our capacity to relate, reflect, and repent.

Our task is not merely to oppose him, but to become different, to resist with care, to hold truth with tenderness, to make room for a future not built on winners and losers, but on participants and co-creators.

Care is not weak. It is the quiet strength that endures beyond applause. It is the ethic that survives when the spectacle has faded.

And it may be, in the end, our only way home.

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References

• Carroll, E. J. (2019). What Do We Need Men For? St. Martin’s Press.
• Forbes. (2016). Donald Trump’s Business Failures Are Very Real.
• Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice. Harvard University Press.
• Jung, C. G. (1959). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Princeton University Press.
• Kelly, G. A. (1955). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Norton.
• Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. University of California Press.
• Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. Routledge.
• Washington Post Fact Checker. (2021). Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years.
• Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and Reality. Macmillan.

A Sonnet Cycle: The Forgotten Knowing

I. The Silence of the Old Beliefs

Once whispered truths now linger out of reach,
A world once known, now lost to silent air.
The trees still speak, the rivers still beseech,
Yet ears grow deaf, and hearts forget to care.

The stars once wove their stories in the night,
Their glimmers traced a meaning we could trust.
Yet now we weigh them, measure out their light,
And turn their whispers into cosmic dust.

What once was sacred, now is named profane,
For mystery defies the rule of mind.
Yet in the margins, shadows still remain,
And truths half-sensed refuse to stay confined.

The earth still breathes, though we no longer know
A presence lost, yet felt in moonlit glow.

---

II. The Cost of Knowing Too Much, Yet Not Enough

We chart the heavens, name the winds and tides,
Unweave the rainbow, split the atom’s core.
Yet what is lost when only mind decides
That life is but the sum of things it stores?

A sacred hush once held the dawn in awe,
A whispered voice within the morning’s breath.
Now nature bends beneath the human law,
Its spirit ground beneath the wheels of death.

No god commands, no spirits weave the thread,
No sacred fire burns within the stone.
Yet something calls us still, though long thought dead,
A truth half-seen, a knowing still our own.

For all our grasping, something slips away
An ancient song the world still longs to play.

---

III. The Return of the Whispered Truths

Yet who decreed that all must be explained?
That measured truth is all that we may trust?
What if the soul of things remains unchained,
Still breathing ‘neath the weight of time and dust?

What if the river sings, though none may hear,
Its waters whispering of deeper grace?
What if the wind still speaks, though we draw near
With instruments, yet fail to see its face?

Not all is lost, though much has been denied.
The stars still burn, though stripped of myth and name.
A world unseen still beckons from the tide,
Still waits for us to hear its voice again.

For truth is not just that which we ‘command’
It dwells in all, if we but take its hand.

---

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(a journey from reasoning to reckoning)

There was a time
when I believed in leadership development.

Not just believed…
I delivered it.
Designed it.
Defended it.

Reasoning was the compass;
Analysis, the path.
Models, frameworks, evidence, logic;
Clean lines of thought drawn across messy lives.

Sinek said “start with why”.
West said “lead with compassion”.
Britnell sketched the future in NHS blue.

And I followed.

But over time, the logic frayed.
The frameworks thinned.
The systems stopped making sense
in the face of what people were really carrying.

What looked whole on paper
felt hollow in practice.

So I began to turn
away from reasoning
and toward something deeper.

Something older.

A kind of reckoning.

Not with outcomes,
but with meaning.
Not with strategy,
but with soul.

Reckoning invited me
to bring back the parts I’d left behind:

Imagination.
Aesthetics.
Grief.
Longing.
Ethics, not as principle,
but as presence.

The moral weight of a moment.
The quiet shame of pretending.
The courage to ask:
“What does this ask of me?”
“Not just what works—but what’s right?”

It was no longer enough
to analyse complexity.
I had to feel it. To dance with it.
I had to let it change me.

To let a poem
teach me more about leadership
than a thousand keynote slides.

To let silence
become more illuminating
than any strategy session.

To let beauty
reawaken a part of me
that had gone numb from too much sense-making
and not enough wonder.

Now, I sit with people,
not to teach,
but to listen.

I ask them not what they know,
but what they’re carrying.
What they’ve lost.
What they can no longer ignore.

We don’t fix.
We reckon.

Together.

So no, I don’t do leadership development anymore.
Not as it’s usually done.

I walk with people
who are ready to leave the map behind.

Who are willing to ask:
“Who am I now?”
“What does love require of me here?”
“What if I led from my aliveness, not my CV?”

It’s not fast.
Not neat.
Not scalable.

But it’s true.
And sometimes, that’s enough.

Are you ready to Follow the Thread?