Is integrity the essence of everything successful?

I absolutely think it is. And I believe it’s one of the most vital elements of a more optimistic future and meaningful life. That’s why I’ll be exploring these ideas in my guest post while Tom’s on holiday.

Before meeting Tom for the first time, I remember reading that he co-founded his business with Vineeta to test the hypothesis that “sustainable business was not an oxymoron if sustainability was designed in”. I was blown away by the transparency, intellectual curiosity and honest commitment to a clear purpose. And the more I’ve got to know Tom, the more I can see his principles and values coming to life.

Integrity can be defined as doing the right thing even if no one’s watching - it provides the principles to help us navigate the world with clarity, purpose and impact. And based on Tom’s principles and resulting actions, Tom demonstrates his integrity regularly. However, I’m sure you can think of many examples of other leaders, businesses and politicians doing awful things when we’re looking the other way.

So why do our current and historical leaders find it so hard to choose integrity? They have the technology, budgets and knowledge to follow a path of fairness, equality and regeneration, but they don’t. And that’s what many of us find so difficult to witness.

‘Sustainability’ focussed business activities and investments are growing rapidly, raising the risk of green-washing. This highlights that some of the people that got us into this mess are now hoping to make lots of money while attempting to fix the problems they helped to create. And that won’t work - all the technology, machine learning and carbon offsetting in the world won’t make up for morally corrupt business practices and questionable parameter setting. Without integrity, there is no hope.

Integrity can be considered as the wholeness of an outcome and is a foundation of systems theory. If people aren’t viewing their decisions through an intersectional lens, they may be hoping that investing and buying sustainably might offset the bad things they’re doing in other ways - almost an offsetting of their own guilt as they know deep down that what they do in other areas of their lives is wrong. Ultimately, I believe the success of our activities are dependent on integrity, not drivers of it. A CEO who takes a £2m salary while their workers struggle to pay bills might need to question the role they play in society. If we consider who benefits from an outcome or decision and despite it sometimes not being ourselves (but it adds value to others) then maybe that is the integrity we need to show.

I therefore believe we all have a very important role to play in claiming back the power we’ve lost and through the application of our own integrity, we can drive impact and support each-other through upcoming tipping points.

The basis for much of my thinking on this has been driven through the work of the incredible Buckminster Fuller (who originally suggested that ‘integrity is the essence of everything successful’). Bucky was an inventor, architect, philosopher and systems-thinker who held 28 patents, received 47 honorary degrees, was the second World President of Mensa and was often called the “Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th century”. Despite all of this, he considered himself an average man who passionately believed in the value of every individual and our ability to create fundamental and spontaneous change:

“I’m not trying to counsel any of you to do anything really special except dare to think. And dare to go with the truth. And to dare to really love completely.”

To me that is the essence of integrity. We may have different perspectives of our truth but if love is driving us forwards rather than fear, we will build trust, meaningful communities and co-collaborate on some of the biggest challenges we face. And this ultimately is how we achieve the regeneration, connections and deliver more with less (another of Bucky’s principles).

Of Bucky’s many patents, one of the most accessible is the geodesic dome and this time last year, I stayed with my family in a dome in Devon. It was an amazing experience and it led me to think about structural integrity and how the bigger the dome becomes, the stronger it will be. And that principle will also apply to us as humans - the more there are of us acting with integrity, the stronger our connections and impact we will have.

Another key part of our experience in Devon, was spending time living in a setting of shared resources - bathrooms, kitchens and recreational facilities. It was great, we shared, we trusted each other and we became an interconnected community for a few days.

So what stops us living like this in everyday life? I think it might be fear and our expectation of others. I recently completed an amazing course with the 'Common Cause Foundation' who shared the results of their 'Perceptions Matter' survey. What the data showed was that 74% of the respondents placed greater importance on their own personal compassion for others rather than selfish values. Sounds good. Unfortunately, 77% of the respondents also said that they believe that other people hold selfish values. This distrust in others within society means that we feel less positive about getting involved and feel less responsible for our communities.  

This means the norms within society are built with this idea that we can’t trust each-other and we therefore can’t act with integrity as if we do, somebody else may benefit over us. But I think that’s the point, if we dare to go with the truth, and we begin to role-model our own principles and values in action then maybe we can create a collective movement of good.

So what’s stopping us being brave enough to go with the truth and grow our power? I think it comes back to the very foundations of what it means to be human. We’re in a constant balancing act of choosing attachment to others or authenticity to ourselves.

The work of Dr Gabor Maté in this field is incredibly insightful. Humans are wired for empathy, connection, love and compassion and when we are born, our ability to create attachments with our care givers is vital to our survival. But during our early years, we learn that being our authentic selves might disrupt this attachment and we feel hurt and shame.

This disconnection can grow during our lives up to the point that we become increasingly alienated from nature, people, work and ourselves. We then disconnect from our true-selves and shut down our gut feelings to preserve our attachment to others. The inner turmoil this creates can lead to mental health conditions, toxic stress and the acceptance of things we may not be happy with. This may be why good people can do bad things at work, they have learnt to value their attachment (to status, their boss and the other people in their system) over their authentic self.

I’m continuing to explore this theory in my own life. As Tom mentioned last week, I made a big shift in my working life, moving from leading large scale corporate marketing to starting my own integrity focussed brand consultancy.

Marketing and sustainability create a complex dichotomy but my principles of integrity provide a useful structure. For example, I’ve previously used the B Corp framework to explore the credibility of a marketing strategy and pulled significant marketing budget from some of the most damaging media publications through the ‘Stop Funding Hate’ campaign. Through this, I was demonstrating my belief that meaningful long term brand equity is vital for shorter term marketing effectiveness (and that we must consciously consider the decisions we make).

This balancing of long/short term also impacted on my personal life when I explored the principles of true happiness vs transient pleasure, leading me to make some significant changes and improvements in my lifestyle, diet and habits. During this process of redesigning my life, I’m trying to listen to my authentic self more effectively which has led to some shifts in my attachment style (which had previously been focussed on the needs of others rather than my own) and this has created some points of tension. But without tension, it’s impossible to achieve integrity. And if I get it wrong, I know that I’m acting with love and just trying to go with the truth.

Thanks very much for reading this and also to Tom for asking me to share my thoughts.

I’d love you to get in touch and hear what integrity means to you.