Maximise human potential, not shareholder profit.
People experience value — not processes, not tools. Optimise for the capability of the people in the system; the rest follows.
People experience value, not processes or tools. That's the line that sits on the wall of every engagement. Processes don't feel anything; tools don't feel anything; the only entity in the system that can experience a service as good or bad is a person. If we forget that, we end up optimising for the indicator at the cost of the thing the indicator was a proxy for.
The posture follows: maximise human potential, not shareholder profit. This sentence has been read as a political statement; it isn't. It's an operational one. Shareholder profit, taken as the primary optimisation target, encourages decisions that systematically erode the capability of the people who run the service. Maximising human potential — the capability and reach of the people doing the work — is, over any horizon longer than a quarter, the better way to produce shareholder profit too.
Three operational consequences.
If you take the posture seriously, three things tend to change in how you organise an engagement:
- Slack becomes a feature. Teams that are 100% utilised cannot learn, cannot rehearse, cannot improve. The right utilisation is somewhere south of that, and the budget for the engagement should reflect it.
- Documentation becomes an act of generosity. When you write a runbook for the next person on the rota, you're contributing to their potential, not just covering yourself. The tone follows.
- The retrospective becomes the most important meeting on the calendar. The team that talks honestly about what didn't work is the team that gets better. The team that doesn't, doesn't.
What the poster says.
The original infographic was a single sentence and a few supporting bullets. I'd write it the same way today:
People experience value. Maximise the capability of the people in the system. The rest follows.
And the caveat.
None of this is an argument for sentimentality. The posture works because it produces better outcomes, not because it sounds kind. The cold, transactional reading of every operational practice in the eight is also the one that produces the best long-run numbers. If you find yourself having to choose between the two, you're probably not solving the right problem.