Morality tale doesn't scale
I recently spent time with a team whose language had stopped working.
Not the strategy. Not the product. The language. They could feel themselves hitting a wall but couldn’t name why.
A company whose language was built for one era, one market, one audience. It doesn’t drag and drop into the next one.
People think this is a messaging problem. It’s usually a worldview problem.
A morality tale doesn’t scale.
Morality works in controlled, homogenous, bounded units of culture. Stable markets. Tight families. Small communities with shared values. In those settings, moral framing builds cohesion because the underlying basis is long established and accepted.
But in moments when worldviews and value systems collide, moralistic framing repels as much as it attracts. It establishes superiority at the cost of alienation, creating exits out of your story. It invites rejection. The instinct when this happens is to double down. To be unapologetic. To say it more loudly. To brute force your way through the thicket.
Except this collapses the Total Available Market (TAM) of your audience, instead of expanding it.
The move is to switch language registers.
From morals to principles.
That team I mentioned earlier had the following language:
“Advancing inclusive research...Bending the arc of research toward equitable health outcomes...A triple win for our patients, our science, our business...Science should serve everyone.”
In contrast:
“Broaden the evidence base to expand the value of the portfolio. Better data across populations means broader labels, faster approvals, lower regulatory risk. Expand the reach of precision medicine. Every molecule can reach its full commercial and clinical value.”
Same fundamental work. Same outcomes for the same patients. Different language registers.
The first version limits how many players across the healthcare value chain can identify with the story. The second is structurally unattackable, because it speaks in the language of value, outcomes, and relevance.
As I mentioned last week, I’m also working with a global policy initiative making a similar shift, from the language of campaign activism to the language of capital allocation. Their original framing was rooted in moral imperative. The rewrite positions it as a coordination layer for government ministers, scientific researchers, and Silicon Valley tech.
This is not about hiding what you believe.
It’s the subtle difference between being right or being effective.
It’s also whether you want your language to function as a flag or as a road. A flag rallies the people who already share your values. A road carries more people to the destination, even if they entered from different starting points.
Here’s my AI prompt of the week
Pull up your mission statement, or the way you describe your work to a customer or investor
Copy/paste the entire text of this newsletter into your LLM of choice
Ask “where does our language signal morals, and where does it signal boardroom legibility?”
Anywhere it signals morals, what might we be losing? Who might decide they don’t belong in this narrative?
What alternative language might pull them in if we described ourselves differently?
Prioritize market-legibility and the language of executives. Move beyond abstraction to clarity about “for who/so that”
Answer: “so what, why now, and how what we do compounds...”
Review the output. See what resonates. Discard what’s not useful.
You might feel a small loss. The moral version had more emotional charge. It made you feel righteous when you read it.
The principled version is less bombastic. But the principled version travels.
The side with the cleanest, clearest, most legible language wins. Not the side with the most defensible moral position.
Instead of moralistic, go principled. Principled scales to infinity.