End with Why

For a fraction of a second, I considered being dishonest.

Simon Sinek got it backwards. Purpose isn’t why great people join you—it’s what they build after you’ve paid them fairly.

I reluctantly informed a client that they’d made a double payment from two different departments. For a fraction of a moment, I considered waiting to see if anyone at that company would notice. (It was a significant sum!) But then I observed my own thoughts and intervened, “No. That’s not the person I aspire to be.” So I returned the duplicate transaction and ended up feeling aligned with myself. Why did I send the money back? Because I’d rather be poor but honorable than rich and dishonest.

Doing good was the byproduct. Feeling good was the motive.

I did that primarily for myself.

What’s In It for Me? (WIIFM)

Sociologists George Homans, Peter Blau, and Richard Emerson explained with Social Exchange Theory (SET) that human interactions follow a continuous cost-benefit analysis. Individuals take part in groups to maximize rewards (safety, belonging, recognition, reputation, etc.) and to minimize costs (time, effort, energy, expenses, and so on).

In my case, the (long-term) reward of boosting my reputation and the (short-term) feelings of integrity outweighed the immediate cost of returning the duplicate payment. It might seem cynical, but most people’s efforts at “doing good” are often just socially acceptable masks draped over things that boil down to return on investment calculations, or “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM)

Economist Mancur Olson described something similar in The Logic of Collective Action (1965). People won’t act to achieve a shared goal unless there is some personal benefit, he wrote. Shared purpose, said Olson, is a public good: it is available to everyone for free. It costs nothing to just say, “Let’s save the planet!” What motivates people to action is what they gain individually from their contribution to the common cause, which can be compensation, reputation, belonging, or any other social or economic incentive.

From Prosci’s ADKAR to Kotter’s 8-Step Change Framework, the matter of “What’s in it for me” gets serious airtime in practically every change management model. Each one of us evaluates change and transformation through a lens of self-interest, and we resist when the ROI seems negative. If it doesn’t pay us, it doesn’t sway us.

Politicians probably know this better than anyone.

However, that doesn’t mean a grand purpose won’t work.

Why Should I Care? (WSIC)

The same George Homans (of Social Exchange Theory) argued that group dynamics typically has three components: activities (tasks and duties), interactions (verbal and non-verbal), and sentiments (feelings and emotions). These three components continuously influence each other, resulting—if all goes well—in a cohesive, self-reinforcing social unit with a strong sense of meaning. In other words, a group’s purpose emerges from their collaboration and is more powerful than any top-down directives imposed by management.

Social Identity Theory (SIT) by social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner then takes over from SET and explains how individuals use group membership to derive self-esteem and pride. (If you want to see this in action, just watch any football fan’s reactions to their team’s results in the FIFA World Cup.)

People with “low organizational identification” do not yet internalize the group’s “Why.” They still require social exchanges—cost-benefit reciprocity and transactional rewards. We can call them social exchange dominant. But others with “high organizational identification” strongly identify with the group’s “Why.” They need social identity—purpose, vision, mission, values, and principles. We can call them social identity dominant. Crucially, continuous positive social exchanges turn the former group into the latter. Social exchange turns into social identity, not the other way around.

Psychologists Edward L. Deci and Richard Ryan offered us the same message through Self-Determination Theory (SDT). Purpose is real, but people usually internalize it over time. They don’t adopt it on day one. People typically enter an organization for extrinsic reasons (pay, security, opportunity) and only internalize an organization’s purpose as their own once the group meets their needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Pay precedes purpose.

Pay precedes purpose.

Finally, political economist Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel-winning work confirmed that people solve collective-action problems not via a pre-existing shared purpose but through reciprocity, reputation, and trust that develop via repeated interaction and face-to-face communication. Humans are a mix of self-interest and the capacity to develop shared norms, but purpose is more often the output of collaboration rather than the input.

That’s a significant group of experts and scientists all suggesting the same thing: successful collaboration doesn’t start with why; it ends with why.

Why Start with Why Fails

In his bestselling book Start With Why (2009), inspirational speaker Simon Sinek argued that leaders who communicate a shared purpose (why) before their method (how) and product (what) inspire loyalty and improved performance. With his model of the “Golden Circle,” Sinek tried to give his ideas a neurological foundation. He related the inner circle (why) to the limbic system, where emotions would originate, and his outer circle (what) to the neocortex, where rational thought was suggested to emerge, using this as a biological justification for why “people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”

Sadly, the golden circle did not survive impact with the golden rule of scientific rigor: one must frame and execute models and theories so that others can independently reproduce, scrutinize, and potentially falsify them.

The problem was that Start With Why relied almost exclusively on anecdotes, with 235 mentions of Apple as the primary success template, while providing no scientific backing—no surveys, no control groups, and no longitudinal studies. Sinek provided zero evidence that Apple’s success at the time stemmed from a shared purpose rather than product quality, impeccable timing, or brilliant marketing. Critics noted that he cherry-picked confirming cases and omitt