In January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney he addressed Davos and said what many business leaders were already feeling but hadn’t yet mentioned. “Let me be direct,” he told the room. “We’re in the middle of a rupture, not a transition.” He called it the end of a pleasant fiction – decades of deepening global integration built on the assumption of mutual benefit – and the beginning of something tougher, less predictable and significantly more important.
This week, as leaders gather again for Summer Davos in Dalian, China, under the theme “Innovation at Scale,” Carney’s framing has only sharpened in importance. The agenda reflects a world being redrawn in real time: changing commercial and industrial realities, energy markets unsettled by conflict in the Middle East, AI reshaping the nature of knowledge working faster than organizations can adapt. The question asked during these sessions – how do you build and scale in such a volatile environment? – is one that most leaders are responding to with the wrong tools.
The instinct in the rupture is to reach for more: more scenario planning, more technology, more readiness frameworks. What is overlooked, over and over again, is the one thing that makes it all work: a clear and activated sense of organizational purpose. Not a statement of purpose. An activated goal. Difference is everything.
When the map falls apart, the goal is the compass
The business world has invested heavily in purpose over the past decade. Most large organizations now have one—a carefully crafted statement of why they exist, disclosed in an external location, printed in the annual report, and then quietly surpassed by the urgency of the next quarter.
Research is unclear about the cost of this gap. Companies that honestly align their business practices with their stated purpose average pre-tax profit rose by 31 percent in 2024. Companies with statements of intent but no meaningful activation: 3 percent. That 28-point difference is not explained by sophistication of strategy, investment in technology or talent. It is explained by the discipline that must be followed.
Under stable conditions, organizations can cope with the gap between stated values and actual decisions. Stakeholders are forgiving, markets are predictable, and the cost of non-compliance is slow and widespread. At break, it accelerates. When trade relationships break overnight, when AI renders last year’s competitive advantages obsolete, when geopolitical shocks force rapid strategic reorientations, organizations that know exactly what they exist to do are the ones that can move quickly and coherently. All others run the risk of accelerating in several directions simultaneously: impressive in motion, incoherent in effect.
This is exactly what Summer Davos in Dalian is facing. The question of how to harness technology for real economy results – one of the meeting’s five main themes – cannot be answered by technology alone. AI can generate strategy options, model scenarios and identify opportunities faster than any management team can process them. What it cannot do is tell a leader what the organization should actually pursue. This requires a clarity of purpose that most organizations claim to have, but very few have actually activated.
The activation gap
In our work with boards and executive teams across multiple sectors and continents, we’ve mapped the journey from stated purpose to lived purpose as a six-stage lifecycle: awaken, act, articulate, align, amplify, and secure. Most organizations complete the first three and call it done. The last three – where real competitive advantage is built – are where the momentum stops.
The alignment phase is the most important and most often overlooked. It is where purpose becomes an active decision-making filter: which investments are funded, which are withheld, who is hired, how performance is evaluated. One of our clients, a government organization, performed a full inventory of all projects on the fly at this stage, aligning them with purpose. During the following year, they completed 30 percent of those projects. It was not a cost-cutting exercise. It was an exercise in clarity—and it created the organizational focus that made everything else faster and more effective.
In an age of rupture, that kind of clarity is not nice to have. It is the mechanism by which organizations avoid the paralysis that unstable conditions produce.
What it looks like when it works
Kiwibank, New Zealand’s state-owned bank, built its purpose activation around three externally focused pillars with clear, time-bound commitments. Since 2021, its balance sheet has grown consistently ahead of the market, with lending and deposit growth outperforming competitors through some of New Zealand’s most challenging economic conditions. CEO Steve Jurkovich has been straightforward about the mechanism: “We achieve performance through purpose. Once we worked out what purpose really meant to us, it became a win-win — not a trade-off.”
Places for People, a UK social enterprise operating across housing and community development, brought 20 businesses together under one purpose—Because Community matters— and then did the most difficult structural work: aligning every major decision with it. Their 2024 engagement survey achieved a 94.9 percent completion rate. Their impact framework reported £334 million in social value generated in fiscal year 2024. These results did not come from a statement of purpose. They came from the years of disciplined work that followed.
The question of leadership must do Dalian
The Summer Davos agenda asks how organizations can find prosperity amidst changing commercial and industrial realities, how they can use technology for real economy results, and how they can create jobs and opportunities in the next phase of growth. These are the right questions. But all have one prerequisite that rarely appears on the agenda: leaders must know what they exist to do before they can respond well to any of them.
Carney’s rupture framing is useful precisely because it removes the comfort of incremental thinking. In a transition, you adapt. In a snap, you rebuild. And rebuilding—of strategy, of operating models, of relationships with employees and communities—requires a foundation that will stand when everything else changes.
This foundation is the activated intention. Not as an aspiration, but as an operating system. Not as something to communicate, but as something to live—one decision, one exchange, one honest conversation of accountability at a time.
Organizations that leave Dalian with a clearer answer to this fundamental question will not only be better positioned to innovate at scale. They will be the ones still standing when the next snap comes.
Jennie McLaughlin is the Founder and Chief Purpose Officer of Led transformation of purpose and former EY Partner. Sarah Rosenthaler is a chartered psychologist, leadership consultant and author of books including Powered by Purpose. Together, they work with boards and executive teams globally for purposeful activation.
