Values as the Commons — The Test Most Leaders Get Wrong

Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of Defense, recently gathered all his generals to a single conference. Hundreds of them. From every command, every theatre, every branch of the service. The keynote could have started anywhere.

It started with values.

Not with strategy. Not with hardware. Not with budgets. With what they stand for and what allows them to work together. Politics aside — and politics matter, but they're not what this piece is about — that move is textbook. It's what every operator at the top of every organisation should be doing right now. And almost nobody is.

What follows is why that move works, what makes it stick, and what it has to do with AI.

The decision behind the move

What he was doing was establishing the commons.

Before you can move an organisation, you need to know what the organisation actually shares. Not what's on the wall. Not what people say in interviews. What they actually act on when no one is watching. What they argue from when there's a disagreement. What they default to under pressure.

That's the commons. Without it, no strategy moves. No restructure lands. No new technology integrates. The decisions get made — but the organisation doesn't follow, because there's nothing common underneath.

Most leaders skip this step. They list values on the careers page and call it done. Hegseth's move was to stop and re-establish the commons before doing anything else. In an organisation as large and as politically loaded as the US military, that's a hard thing to do at all — let alone publicly.

The principle isn't unique to the military. It's the same move every operator at the top of every organisation needs to make right now. With their leadership team. Around the boardroom table. Before the next reset, before the next AI deployment, before the next strategic pivot.

The framework

In Resolute, Chapter 7, I write down a principle. Values reveal character. Character scales culture.

That sentence does a lot of work. Let me unpack it.

Values are not beliefs. They are not what you say. They are not what's printed on the back of your business card. Values are revealed by character — by what you actually do, especially under pressure. The values that show up in your behaviour when it costs you something. Those are your real values. The ones on the wall might or might not match.

Character — once it's revealed — only scales into a culture when it's shared. When it's common. One person of high integrity in an organisation of low integrity creates an exception, not a culture. A team of common integrity scales integrity into how the whole organisation works. That's the move. Not values — but commons.

This is where most modern organisations have got lost. The emphasis goes on the values — let's pick the right words, let's print the poster, let's update the handbook. The emphasis should go on the commons — what is genuinely shared, lived, defaulted-to under pressure. Whether the words are perfect matters far less than whether the team actually holds them in common.

The etymology that matters

The British legal system has a House of Commons. It's where the way we actually live gets decided. Not the way we should live, theoretically — the way we, in common, do live. The word commons points at exactly the right thing. Common land was land everyone in the village had a right to use and a responsibility to maintain. Common values are the same. Held together. Defended together. Applied together.

It's not — and this is important — the same as everyone agreeing on everything. I don't need to agree with every belief my colleague holds. I need to find the common ground on which the two of us can work. That's alignment. That's commons.

The opposite is the failure mode I've seen in a lot of mid-market businesses recently. I must make you believe everything I believe — and if you don't, we cannot work together. That's not common values. That's organisational tyranny dressed in values language. It looks principled and it acts authoritarian.

Modern organisations have a third failure mode too — the air-fairy version. Values listed in a tone of voice that means nothing. Integrity. Excellence. Innovation. Customer focus. Words that could be on any company's wall and tell you nothing about who they actually are. That's not common values either. That's just printed.

Stuart Leo

Not values — but commons.

The test

Here is how you know whether a value is common, or just printed.

Take the value. Pick one off your wall. Integrity works as well as any. Now turn it into a common practice. A practice is something you do, not something you believe. So Integrity might become — don't do anything you wouldn't want going viral on social media tomorrow. That's a practice. It's testable. The whole team can act on it.

Now turn the practice into an expected behaviour. An expected behaviour is what the team defaults to when the situation arises. Whatever the context — a financial dealing, an ad campaign, a hiring decision, a firing decision, a product launch, a client conversation — you apply the practice and the answer is right there. Easy. Nothing to debate. Would I want this on social media tomorrow? If no, don't do it. If yes, proceed.

That is a common value. Value, practice, behaviour. Connected. Lived. Testable in any situation by any team member without escalation.

Now run the test on the values you have today. Take one off the wall. Can your team name a practice that operationalises it? If they each give a different answer, the value is not common. Can your team name an expected behaviour that holds in any context? If they have to think about it for more than ten seconds, the value is not common. It's just printed.

This is the test most leaders skip.

Why this matters more in 2026, not less

Here is where AI comes in.

Tools change weekly now. The model that was state of the art six months ago is mid-tier today. The framework you trained your team on last year may be obsolete this year. Skills go stale in months. The half-life of technical knowledge has collapsed.

What does not change at that pace is the values layer. The character layer. Who you actually are when the tools are different and the skills are different and the playbook is different. That layer is the durable one. It is the one that carries through the volatility — because it predates the volatility.

So the values layer — the common values layer specifically — is doing more work in 2026 than it has ever done. It is the only thing stable enough to anchor a team that is running on quarterly tooling changes.

And here is the sharper point. AI scales whatever is there. It does not invent values. It executes them. If your team's values are common — actually common, in the sense that everyone could pass the test — then AI scales culture. Every prompt, every automation, every agent your team builds will compound the same character into the work. That's powerful.

If your values are not common — if they are aspirational on the wall and contested in the room — then AI scales the fragmentation. Each team member writes prompts to their own private value. Each builds agents to their own working philosophy. Each automates the work in the way they personally would do it. The organisation looks busier and produces less coherent output every quarter. That's the failure mode nobody is naming yet — but it is showing up everywhere I look.

Hegseth's move — establishing commons before doing anything else — is the move every CEO needs to make in 2026. Before the AI rollout, not after. Before the new strategy, not after. Before the org redesign, not after. You cannot write a coherent system prompt on contested ground. You cannot build an agent that represents the team if the team doesn't represent itself in common.

The Monday morning test

Walk into your next leadership meeting. Pick one value off your wall. Run the test.

Can the team agree on a practice that operationalises it? Not in theory. In a sentence. Don't do X. Always do Y. Concrete.

Can the team agree on an expected behaviour that holds in any context — financial, marketing, hiring, technical, customer-facing? Not five different answers. One.

If yes — that value is common. Build on it. It is the foundation everything else stacks on.

If no — that value is just printed. Don't print it any more. Either do the work to make it common, or take it off the wall.

Then, when you've done that for one or two real values, do the same for the use of AI in your work. What is your common practice on AI use? What is the expected behaviour when an AI tool surfaces a recommendation? When a junior writes a prompt for a client deliverable? When an agent acts autonomously inside the workflow?

If you can't answer — and most leadership teams can't right now — you don't have commons on AI yet. That is the first work. Before the next licence purchase. Before the next pilot. Before the next deployment.

Get the commons first. Then scale.

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If your leadership team is sitting with a values reset — or trying to deploy AI on top of a culture you're not sure is actually common — that's the work. Start a conversation.