I have spent thirty years in and around the argument that capital should be answerable for what it does. That’s long enough to have been called naïve, difficult, insufficiently commercial and insufficiently mission-driven, sometimes in the same week. I’ve been called a tree hugger, Swampy and more names than I care to remember. I’ve also been at this long enough to notice that the people I recognise most quickly – across sectors, countries and generations – are not the ones who readily or easily agree with me, but the ones who lean in for the conversation, never the challenge. They are the ones who arrived at their position by a similar route.

For too long, I have wondered who we really are. Not our titles. Not our credentials. But who we are under the biographies. So, I decided to ask a few of these people. Forty-four of them to be precise. These are the people who are building alternatives to the systems they work in. They include founders, chief executives, chief impact officers, heads of sustainability, mostly in finance, mostly in the UK. They all answered a survey about where their journey began, what drives it, what it has cost, and what they still cannot decide. Their answers are set here against around a hundred peer-reviewed studies of people like them, surfaced through seven structured literature searches using Consensus.app.

I am one of these people. Which is the point and also the problem. Every methodological risk in this work runs toward somewhat flattering us, so the literature is used as a check rather than a backdrop. I’ve also included a full section to where I think our account of ourselves is least trustworthy. It is also an incredibly small community of people to survey so I do not pretend that this is an academic paper in any form. It is an exercise borne from curiosity and freely shared to stimulate further engagement and support those coming up through the ranks.

Most of what we describe has been observed before, in other countries and other sectors, by researchers with no stake in the answer. That is the most useful thing about the exercise. But three findings survive it.

Nobody sent us

Sixteen per cent name a mentor or early influence as a driver – the weakest of five options by a wide margin, in a group where 45% date their sense of being out of step to childhood. The literature describes early ideological and leadership socialisation shaping people toward this work. We describe something closer to its absence. An ecosystem assuming the next generation will be mentored into this may be waiting for a mechanism that does not yet exist at the scale. What does exist are values and the increasing ability of us all to assess when those values are not being reflected in what we see.

The thing we care most about is the thing no framework measures

Seventy-two per cent say the impact they are proudest of is a shift in someone’s thinking. Twenty-four per cent say they do not measure what matters – they observe. Eight of those ten name shifts in thinking as their proudest contribution. I should be careful here, because my question did not distinguish between personal judgement and organisational practice. These are senior people in regulated firms, certified B Corporations, charities and other institutions who will be measuring extensively, much of it mandatory. The insight here is that where institutional measurement is in place, it is not necessarily where these people’s confidence comes from. No framework in current use measures systemic change, so the contribution most of us name as our proudest is not unmeasured through negligence but unmeasurable with the instruments that exist. That gap sits underneath and on top of the disclosure and ratings architecture now being built globally.

We are negotiating with the mainstream, not fighting it

Nine per cent reject the mainstream outright. Fifty-nine per cent want scale without compromising integrity; 55% are actively trying to shift it; 75% respond to pushback by adapting rather than confronting. I call this conditional assimilation. The mission drift literature describes precisely the risk it attracts – in particular Bruder’s ‘practice drift’, where the mission survives intact and the practices pursuing it quietly change. Every one of us reports adapting without compromising. Some of us must be wrong.

What we may be getting wrong

–  Only one respondent in forty-four thinks failure can ever be a sign to stop. Persistence is the trait we are proudest of; at that ratio it is also an inability to potentially recognise a stop signal.

–  “Democratic” ranks bottom among the futures we want, thirty points behind equitable and regenerative, in a group where 84% want power transparent. We haven’t yet noticed the tension.

–  The work has cost 70% of us time, 45% financial security, and 27% each health and relationships. What sustains us is not the mission, it is people, at 73%. An ecosystem depending on purpose in lieu of security has an attrition problem it has not yet costed

What this means now

Put the three findings together and a coherent picture emerges, with consequences that probably don’t need to wait for further research.

We have an unusually strong ethical consensus and an unusually weak structural one. Eighty-four per cent of us want power transparent and 77% want it stewarded rather than owned, but two-thirds are still working out what legal form should hold it. The ownership literature suggests that is not a lag on our part but an accurate reading of a field where no single model reliably preserves mission. The sector’s response should therefore be to build the decision support system that doesn’t currently exist, rather than to evangelise one specific model. This is a nascent and emerging conversation in my experience.

We are accountable, by our own account, to future generations and the planet. These are both constituencies that cannot readily engage with us. The only available substitute for that missing accountability is a measurement system we impose on ourselves, and a quarter of us have declined to impose one while locating our proudest work in a category no framework captures – system change. That is a live problem for the disclosure and ratings architecture now being built globally: it may be optimising against proxies its own practitioners don’t completely trust to tell the whole story.

And we are working inside systems we do not control, protected by a conviction that everyone reports and that the drift literature says erodes invisibly. The practical implication is concerning and immediate. If conditional assimilation is the strategy, then the safeguard is governance rather than resolve: a board with the authority to say no, and a written account, made in advance, of what would count as having drifted from mission. Most of us have some version of the first. Almost none of us have the second.

Finally, what sustains this work is relational rather than ideological. People, not mission. Any serious attempt to keep experienced practitioners in the field should be designed around that, and around the fact that the costs are currently borne privately and counted nowhere.

What happens next, and how to join it

Forty-four peer-recruited responses from one network cannot support inference about a population, and this paper does not attempt to do that. What it can do is generate hypotheses precise enough to test, and three are worth testing properly:

–  whether agreeableness falls over the course of a mission-driven career, which the trait literature names as its own most striking gap;

–  whether the institutional metrics largely being developed increase practitioners’ confidence, and, if not, what would; and

–  whether an individual leader’s stated posture toward incumbent systems predicts what later happens to their organisation.

None of this needs a bigger version of my survey. It needs an organisational psychologist, a sustainable finance researcher, someone who knows ipsative measurement, and a sampling frame that does not begin with one person’s address book. It also needs practitioners outside the UK and outside finance, because the most valuable thing that could happen to these findings is for someone to complicate them.

If you recognise yourself in this paper, or you research people like us, or you think we have this wrong, I would love to hear from you. It’s clear we have good people out there carrying the cost of the work that is needed, now more than ever. They need to be better understood so we can leverage that learning more in pursuit of the changes critically needed.