Passion Is the Engine. Belief is the Steering. Contribution is the Advantage.

What organizations need to thrive going forward is employees who are passionate about their work, believe in what the organization is trying to achieve, and actively contribute to delivering the best quality results. As Andrew and I argue in our forthcoming book HumanCorps, the preceding sentence is a systems requirement for the Wisdom Age.

If you believe that the hyper-disruption, complex ecosystems, AI everywhere, and BANI conditions are not temporary conditions, then you may likely come to the same conclusion we have: value doesn’t come from squeezing more compliance out of people. It comes from co-creation: humans applying judgment, creativity, and ethical context in ways machines can’t, and doing it together at scale.

The Gap That Makes “Engagement” Feel Like a Poster

You’ve been in the town hall where leaders announce a bold strategy and then wonder why the workforce doesn’t “lean in.” You’ve watched engagement scores wobble while the organization invests in tools, dashboards, and transformation programs.

In our book HumanCorps we call out the underlying pattern: organisations keep transforming the formal system (i.e., strategy decks, processes, technology) while hoping the informal system (i.e., motivation, beliefs, culture, trust) will somehow fall into place. It rarely does.

And when it doesn’t, leaders often conclude the workforce is the problem.

We start from the opposite position (as have many more before us, many of whom we have learned from): the system is training people not to care.

If you design work as a unit-of-production model with tight oversight, individualised targets, risk aversion, approval chains, then passion becomes irrational. Belief becomes dangerous. Contribution becomes optional.

You don’t get collective intelligence from that. You get learned helplessness with better software.

Why Passion Is Not Soft: It’s the Fuel for Wisdom Work

In HumanCorps, Andrew and I argue we’re moving beyond Knowledge Age “knowing” into Wisdom Age “applying,” where the differentiator is not access to information but the ability to interpret it and act responsibly in context.

That shift changes what “good employees” look like.

The old model valued compliance and repeatability. The emerging model needs people who:

• notice weak signals,
• generate and test hypotheses,
• repair failures with customers,
• coordinate across boundaries,
• and make judgement calls inside ambiguity.

That work requires energy. And energy, HumanCorps suggests, comes from intrinsic motivation: people who care because the work matters to them, not because they’re being pushed by the carrot and stick.

Many workers can smile and do a decent job, but the rare intrinsically motivated person “really cares,” goes the extra mile, and therefore out-performs and out-delivers.

That’s not sentimentality. It’s a performance model.

Belief: The Glue That Turns Individuals into a “Corps”

Passion alone can burn out or scatter. We emphasize in HumanCorps the importance of orientational purpose (i.e., a shared sense of direction and meaning that aligns knowledge, motivation, and action).

Purpose is thus a coherence mechanism. When employees believe in what the organisation is trying to achieve, three things happen:

1. Sensemaking speeds up. People don’t need to escalate every judgment call, because the “why” clarifies tradeoffs.
2. Coordination friction drops. Shared meaning reduces the need for constant negotiation.
3. Accountability becomes collective. People stop acting like renters and start acting like owners.

HumanCorps describes this as moving toward a mindset of ownership and agency. Where ownership is deep duty and commitment to the organisation, and agency is the freedom and ability to act in its best interest.

That combination is what allows collective intelligence to operate. Without it, collaboration becomes meetings. With it, collaboration becomes throughput of insight.

Neuroscience: Why Meaning and Connection Drive Better Work

In our book, we draw heavily from our research, our practical advisory work, and our interactions with those who have been moving forward with particular aspects of this. Neuroscience helps explain why the “passion + belief + contribution” triad is not optional.

1) Stress kills the cognition you need for quality. When people work in chronic uncertainty or threat (e.g., punitive metrics, fear of mistakes, constant change) stress chemistry impairs prefrontal cortex functions required for working memory, cognitive flexibility, and judgment (Arnsten, 2009). Chronic stress can reshape these systems over time, making complex learning and adaptive decision-making harder (McEwen & Morrison, 2013). Quality suffers not because people are lazy, but because their brains are running in survival mode.

2) Autonomy and relatedness power intrinsic motivation. Self-determination theory shows intrinsic motivation is supported by autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Our emphasis in HumanCorps on agency (freedom to act), learning (competence), and shared purpose (relatedness) maps directly onto this. When those needs are met, people invest more energy and persist longer, exactly what “best quality results” require.

3) Trust changes social risk-taking. Research suggests oxytocin can increase interpersonal trust, affecting willingness to take social risks (Kosfeld et al., 2005), and can shape neural circuitry involved in trust adaptation (Baumgartner et al., 2008). In organizational terms: people contribute ideas, dissent, and early warnings when the environment signals safety and trust. That is the behavioral substrate of collective intelligence.

Contribution: Where Collective Intelligence Becomes Real Output

We have unfortunately been in a transition period for some time, where our organizations preach teamwork while rewarding individual targets. If you remunerate individuals for head-down personal achievement, you get exactly that: individual optimization, silos, political behavior, and reduced knowledge-sharing.

We believe that the emerging Wisdom Agre requires a different performance logic: co-defined team goals, progress discussions that start with team outcomes, and rewards that reinforce value-creating behaviors rather than merely measurable activity.

This matters because collective intelligence is not a workshop, but rather a daily operating state:

• people sharing partial truths,
• challenging assumptions respectfully,
• testing ideas fast,
• and learning together.

That is how “best quality results” emerge under complexity: not through one genius, and not through compliance, but through many invested minds coordinating.

Making Passion Sustainable

In other words, it’s not asking leaders to “inspire” harder. It asks leaders to redesign the environment so passion is rational.

That means:

• orientational purpose that connects daily work to meaningful outcomes,
• psychological safety and brave space so people can speak and stretch,
• decision rights and risk envelopes so agency is real (not theatre),
• information transparency so insights can travel,
• and synthetic symbiosis so humans can bridge complexity at scale.

The result is an organization where employees don’t just show up to deliver tasks. They show up to contribute.

Questions to Surface Whether You Have This Capability

• Do your systems make it safe for people to care, or do they punish people for trying?
• Is your “purpose” something employees can use to make tradeoffs, or just something they can quote?
• Do people have real agency to improve quality, or are they trapped in compliance loops?

Because collective intelligence isn’t built by hiring a few passionate people. It’s built by making passion, belief, and contribution the normal outcome of the system.

Works referenced

• Arnsten, AFT. 2009. Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10.6.410-22. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2648
• Baumgartner, T, Heinrichs, M, Vonlanthen, A, Fischbacher, U, & Fehr, E. 2008. Oxytocin shapes the neural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation in humans. Neuron 58.4.639-50. https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(08)00327-9
• Deci, EL, & Ryan, RM. 2000. The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry 11.4.227-68. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/S15327965Pli1104_01
• Kosfeld, M, Heinrichs, M, Zak, PJ, Fischbacher, U, & Fehr, E. 2005. Oxytocin increases trust in humans. Nature 435.7042.673-76. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03701
• McEwen, BS, & Morrison, JH. 2013. The brain on stress: Vulnerability and plasticity of the prefrontal cortex over the life course. Neuron 79.1.16-29. https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(13)00544-8