There’s a question that almost never gets asked in the room where it would matter most.
Not what do you do. Not what problem are you solving. Not what does success look like by the end of the financial year.
Something simpler and more unsettling than any of those.
What are you actually for?
I’ve spent thirty years inside organisations of every kind — public sector, private enterprise, global programmes, early stage ventures. I’ve sat in the rooms where large decisions get made. I’ve watched investment cases get built, briefs get written, programmes get scoped and launched and measured and closed.
And I can count on one hand the number of times I heard anyone ask that question seriously. Not as a values exercise. Not as a branding conversation. As a genuine interrogation of whether the organisation was operating at the full extent of what it could be.
Most of the time nobody asked it at all. Not because the people in the room lacked intelligence or ambition. But because the system they were operating in wasn’t designed to surface it. The brief defined the problem. The problem defined the scope. The scope defined the investment. And everything that followed was optimised against that original definition — efficiently, professionally, and entirely inside a boundary that nobody had thought to question.
The result is a gap. A consistent, structural, almost invisible gap between what organisations deliver and what they could deliver. Between the problem they solved and the problems they could have addressed with the same capability, the same investment, the same infrastructure.
I’ve seen this gap in a healthcare programme designed to serve hundreds of millions of people, where the technology and infrastructure being built had the potential to address needs far beyond the original brief — education, local economic development, community resilience — and nobody in a position to act on that potential was ever asked to look for it.
I’ve seen it in a national data programme where the capability being built could have informed public health, urban planning, and economic inclusion at a scale no other organisation could have matched — and the entire exercise was pointed inward, at commercial returns, because that’s what the brief asked for.
I’ve seen it in a bid for a global organisation that had already done the hard work of connecting its business to wider societal outcomes — and watched the response team default to selling services, because that’s what bid teams do, because that’s what the internal incentive structure rewarded, because nobody had built the habit of asking what the client was actually for before deciding what to offer them.
In each case the people involved were capable. The intentions were good. The work was competent. And the gap remained, because nothing in the process was designed to close it.
The question my new book is trying to answer is what it would take for organisations to develop the alternative. Not just to ask the wider question once, in the right moment, with the right person in the room. But to build the habit of asking it consistently, structurally, before the brief gets written and the frame gets set.
I’m building that answer in public, in part because testing the argument as it develops feels more honest than presenting a finished version I’ve already decided is right. So if something here resonates — or doesn’t — I’d genuinely like to know.
Have you been in that room? Have you watched the wider question go unasked? Have you been the person who tried to ask it and couldn’t get it taken seriously?
I’ll be sharing the stories that shaped this argument over the coming weeks. They’re drawn from programmes I was part of, decisions I watched get made, and a few moments where I got it wrong myself. No company names. But every detail that matters.
*This is the second entry in the Predictive Purpose journal — a book being built in public. If you’re reading this for the first time, start at the beginning. Subscribe at neilcatton.substack.com.
Neil Catton is the author of The Next Evolution, The Cognitive Crucible and The Shadow System - available on Amazon, and writes at the intersection of technology, ethics, and human purpose.
People usually adapt to the metric long before they notice the meaning disappearing.