Today’s organizations worship at the altar of purpose. A stirring slogan, a list of values, a “north star”—and the myth is complete: meaning will cascade from the top, energy will surge from alignment, complexity will melt into coherence. In the purpose narrative, the task is simple: articulate what matters, rally the troops, measure relentlessly, and convert intention into achievement. Doubt is rebranded as disengagement, contradiction smoothed over with new KPIs, and all striving is engineered to make the mission glow. Purpose is not a question, but an answer; not a struggle, but a performance.

This is the ideology of closure: symbolic order rendered complete, absence denied, the Good collapsed into immanent achievement.

But this is often a surface game. The purpose narrative peddles unity, but denies the real divisions that shape collective life—structural contradictions between corporate mission and systemic outcomes, moral aspirations and market logic, property regimes and value charts. It multiplies the goals, then asks for harmony. It manages anxiety with narratives, mental health trainings and dashboards. Its “transformation” is a matter of reproduction: the right story, told often enough, will redeem the system. The true work of ethics—confronting conflict, holding absence, ordering values, justification—is often substituted with comms.

But Flourishing is not harmony but generative contradiction. No single value can complete us. Every self, every organization is structured by lack, contradiction, and unfulfilled longing—not as a flaw, but as the source of all becoming. Real transformation means building institutions that do not erase tension, but harness it; that invite dissent, not just consensus; that treat the unfinished as the engine of learning and value.

In this framework, the focus is on absence, not presence. What is lacking becomes the structural source of potential—an opening that calls for wisdom, practical judgment, and imagination beyond any rule or story. What propels us is not just the friction of opinions but the felt presence of what is still unrealized, what calls for fidelity, commitment, and the ongoing development of selves and institutions. The deepest work of leadership is to shape collective life so that this missingness becomes productive: a space for new meaning, new responsibility, and continuous reshaping of the organisation in a movement towards the good as a perpetual, unfinished, and always contingent quest for systemic excellence.

Where the purpose narrative peddles closure, the dialectical approach demands courage: to remain open, to navigate competing goods, to act without guarantees. Ethics is not a ritual, but an experiment—a collective effort to become more than any purpose can promise. The measure of transformation is not perfection, but willingness to keep faith with absent potential—the ongoing adventure of becoming what we are called to be.

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