This Is Where the Purpose Manifesto Breaks — and Human Meaning Begins
A few weeks ago, I was having dinner with a friend, a CEO who’s survived more board cycles than most people get career chances.
We were talking about what comes next for me. I told him I want to work on human purpose in the age of AI disruption. Not the technology, the people. Because AI is not just a shift in tools. It is a shift in identity. Roles will change, skills will be rewritten and what people believe about their place in the system will be challenged. That is the part I care about, the human heartbeat inside that transition.
He could tell I meant it.
He leaned back, that particular kind of tired that comes from carrying other people’s panic through too many budget seasons. He didn’t dismiss it. He did something sharper. He went straight for the fault line.
“Bec’s, you’ve got to stop trying to change the world. Leaders don’t have room for philosophy right now. They’re dealing with boards, margins, AI pressure — and they’re asking one thing: will this make us faster, leaner, more efficient? That’s how you make money. Purpose sounds noble. But when pressure hits, efficiency always wins.”
He wasn’t being cynical. He was naming the operating code of the system he lives in. And as much as I wanted to resist it, a quiet part of me knew he wasn’t wrong.
Purpose is declared with passion. Then pressure arrives. And the first thing to quietly go missing is meaning. Not because anyone intends it. But because when a system is designed for efficiency first, purpose doesn’t die with a bang. It evaporates through a thousand quiet reallocations.
Only a few years ago, purpose felt like a movement.
It was on every stage, in every strategy deck. Consultants packaged it. Brands declared it like a renaissance. I wasn’t just observing it.
I was part of it, interviewing leaders on The DNA of Purpose Podcast who believed business could become a force for good. And I still believe that. But even then, underneath all the optimism, something in me stayed unsettled.
Because no matter how poetic the language sounded, a harder truth sat beneath every conversation: companies were never designed to carry purpose. They were created for growth, speed and profit. That doesn’t make them bad. It just means they run on a different value set than the humans inside them.
Humans are wired for meaning. Systems are wired for efficiency.
When those two collide, the system doesn’t debate. It defaults. Not with fanfare, but with a subtle shift in what gets resourced, prioritised, or quietly set aside. A value is softened. A promise postponed. No one says “we don’t stand for that anymore.” They don’t have to. Every nervous system in the room reads the signal: when pressure enters, this is what survives.
You see it in the case studies people romanticise. Paul Polman put Unilever on the map as a purpose-driven company. The moment he stepped down, markets snapped straight back to returns.
Emmanuel Faber rewired Danone’s legal DNA to include mission. Two years later, shareholders removed him. Not because purpose failed, but the profits did. Two leaders with integrity. One machine that reverted to its original program.
And this is where the cultural cost begins. You’ve felt it. A leader stands at the front of the room. Eyes bright. They speak about purpose and values and what we stand for. People want to believe them. For a moment, they do.
Then a restructure lands. A hiring freeze. A project disappears. Nothing dramatic. Just a subtle reprioritisation. No one names it. But everyone registers it. And that’s how trust erodes, not through betrayal, but through misalignment between words and actions.
Deloitte named it in their 2024 report. Most executives believe purpose drives their strategy. Fewer than one in four employees believe it changes a single real decision. That gap isn’t intellectual. It’s felt.
And if trust was already fragile, AI has just raised the stakes. Goldman Sachs estimates up to 300 million roles will be reshaped or displaced by automation this decade. On paper, that looks like a labour statistic. But that’s not how it lands in our hearts.
Because when someone hears “your role is being automated,” what they actually register is, “if what I do no longer matters, do I still matter here?” Everything they have built their identity around suddenly feels at risk. That is not a workflow issue, that is an existential moment. That is the tension being missed.
People are not resisting technology. They are resisting the quiet fear of being erased while still standing in the room.
It might show up on the surface as a reskilling challenge, but the deeper work is identity. It is not just about learning new skills. It is about helping people reorient their sense of purpose, to reinterpret who they believed themselves to be, while the ground beneath them is still shifting.
And efficiency, the force that built the last era, cannot solve that. Efficiency makes things faster, but it does not make people fluid, resilient or able to adapt. It does not make them feel more human in a world that is becoming more synthetic. It does not build trust.
Adaptability is not a metric. It is an emotional state. You cannot KPI your way into it. You earn it through meaning. Humans do not adapt to serve efficiency. They adapt when they feel part of something worth evolving for.
Which brings me back to that dinner table.
My friend was right. Purpose treated as a slogan, a slide or a wall poster will always evaporate the moment pressure arrives. Starting with why was never designed to hold under those conditions. But that version of purpose was never the point.
If purpose is going to matter in the age of AI, it cannot remain language. It has to be wired for evolution, something that adapts under pressure rather than disappearing because of it. Something is not organisational, because it is HUMAN.
The future will not belong to organisations with the most poetic purpose statements. It will belong to those who embed purpose so deeply into their people that it shows up instinctively, not when things are calm, but exactly when efficiency tries to override it.
That is the work of The DNA of Purpose™, not as branding, not as belief, but as infrastructure for purpose in motion. A living code built for an era where pressure is constant, and only the systems wired for purpose under strain will support their people to evolve through acceleration.
In the weeks and months ahead, I’ll be opening this framework from the inside, not as an idea to believe in, but as a journey to live, breathe and experience together. If something in this struck a chord, take it as a quiet signal, you are already part of the Purpose Evolution.
Together let's keep meaning in motion,
Becs
www.rebeccamaklad.com
