You can’t say you’re values-led if your budget disagrees

Commentary Narrative Politics Power Private Sector Purpose Strategies

30 April 2026

by Goli Nili

6 minutes of reading

There’s a version of this conversation that lives comfortably in strategy decks where values are clear, well-articulated and deeply believed. Equity, justice, care and community. The language is thoughtful, the intent is genuine and for the most part, everyone in the room means it. But those values aren’t really tested in these moments. They’re tested when something happens in the world that makes neutrality feel impossible.

Over the past couple of years, that has looked like the genocide in Gaza continuing in plain sight, even as coverage fades and language softens. It has looked like the US and Israel carrying out strikes in Iran, framed in ways that many of us recognise as partial, selective and deeply political. These moments don’t sit outside of work. They land in real time, in real bodies, in the middle of working days alongside Slack messages, client deadlines and budget reviews. And that’s when something shifts—not in what an organisation says it believes, but in what it is actually able, or willing, to hold.

The questions come quickly:

Do we acknowledge this? Do we say something publicly? Do we create space internally? Do we adjust expectations?

And just as quickly, another set of questions follows:

What will this cost us? How will clients respond? What does this mean for funding? Can we afford to slow down? Will this cost us clients???

This is the point where values stop being abstract and become operational. And more often than not, this is also the point where they begin to unravel not because people don’t care, but because the systems underneath them were never designed to carry that weight.

I’ve sat in rooms where organisations speak powerfully about justice and care and in the same breath explain why there is no budget for additional wellbeing support, why timelines cannot shift, why it’s safer to stay silent, and why now is “not the moment.”

None of these responses are irrational. In fact, they are entirely rational within the constraints of the system as it has been built.

That’s what makes this so uncomfortable. The issue is rarely hypocrisy; it’s design.

A budget is one of the most honest documents an organisation has. It tells you what is protected, what is flexible, what is considered essential and what is quietly optional. And in many organisations, there is no line that accounts for what it takes to live your values when doing so becomes difficult. There is no allocation for responding to moments of global crisis, no buffer for slowing down when people are carrying grief or anger or fear, no space to absorb the reputational or financial risk that can come with taking a position.

We fund growth. We fund delivery. We fund visibility. But we rarely fund integrity under pressure. When that gap exists, the cost doesn’t disappear. It moves onto people. It shows up in the team member refreshing the news between meetings, trying to stay composed on a client call. It shows up in the person who feels a moral urgency but no permission to express it. It shows up in managers attempting to hold space for their teams while still being held to targets that haven’t shifted to reflect reality.

Over time, it becomes quiet burnout, emotional dissonance and a kind of internal fragmentation where what people are living and what the organisation is saying no longer align. And sometimes, it shows up in more subtle, more complicated ways through the decisions we make internally in the name of care.

There are moments where organisations try to hold complexity by making room for a range of perspectives, even when there isn’t full alignment across the board. These decisions are often made with good intentions: a desire to be humane, to honour relationships, to avoid reducing people to a single viewpoint. In many ways, they come from the same place that values-led work is meant to come from. But without clear boundaries or a shared understanding of what values mean in practice, that complexity can quietly shift into something else. It can create tension that isn’t always named, and a sense, particularly for those most affected, that alignment is negotiable in ways that don’t feel evenly distributed.

The emotional labour of navigating that gap rarely sits with everyone equally and over time, it can erode trust in ways that are difficult to trace back to a single decision. This is the part of values-led work that is hardest to talk about, because it sits in the space between principle and humanity. Care is not always clean. It asks us to hold nuance, but it also requires clarity about what is non-negotiable and what we are asking others to carry when we blur those lines.

When organisations say, “we can’t afford to do more,” it’s worth asking what that really means. Often, it’s not simply a lack of funds, but a lack of foresight. The system wasn’t designed to hold this kind of moment, so the only option is to absorb the impact informally through people, through relationships, through silence. Values-led work does have a cost. It might mean building contingency into budgets and timelines, investing in wellbeing in ways that go beyond surface-level gestures, or being willing to walk away from opportunities that don’t align. It might also mean making harder internal decisions sooner, rather than carrying misalignment in the hope that care alone will resolve it.

The question isn’t whether you can afford your values. It’s whether you’ve designed your organisation in a way that makes them possible. Because if values matter, they have to exist beyond language. They have to show up in how money is allocated, how risk is assessed, how decisions are made and how people are held. They have to be planned for, not improvised in moments of crisis.

Otherwise, what we call values-led organisations are often just groups of people doing their best inside systems that were never built to support them and that gap, over time, becomes impossible to ignore.

— Goli