Purpose Inside the Machine
Q3 2026 Summary
 


Every quarter I look back at what I have written, read and discussed on Neil Gaught On Purpose. It is partly a chance to catch up on anything you may have missed, but it also reveals themes that were not necessarily obvious when each piece was published.

This quarter, one stands out.

Artificial intelligence did not dominate everything I wrote. Far from it. The subjects ranged from Matariki and leadership to organisational change, employee experience, corporate purpose and — surreally — René Magritte. But AI increasingly changes the context in which all those subjects sit.

In The Machine Needs a North Star, I explored what happens when AI begins to change not only how work gets done, but how organisations themselves are organised. As machines become capable of researching, analysing, recommending and increasingly acting, the question of what all that intelligence is ultimately being directed towards becomes much more important. AI can make organisations faster and more capable, but it cannot determine why they exist.

Perhaps appropriately, the quarter began with Matariki and the importance of orientation before action, and ended with the prospect of organisations increasingly populated by intelligent machines. Different worlds, perhaps, but connected by a remarkably similar question: Before we accelerate, do we know where we are going and why?

Here is what I shared during Q3.

Articles

Orientation Before Action: The Wisdom of Matariki

Matariki provided the starting point for a reflection on purpose, stewardship and the value of establishing our bearings before rushing forward.

In a business culture that prizes momentum, Matariki offers a useful reminder that movement and progress are not the same thing. Purpose provides organisations with a point of orientation against which choices about the future can be made.

The Leadership Challenge Hidden in Plain Sight

Prompted by the Oxford–GlobeScan Global Corporate Affairs Survey, I looked at the extraordinary range of pressures now competing for leadership attention.

My argument was that beneath geopolitical, technological, regulatory and social complexity lies a deeper challenge, that being organisational fragmentation. The more complicated the environment becomes, the greater the need for a common organising principle that helps leaders distinguish what matters from what merely demands attention.

This is Not a Purpose
René Magritte’s famous The Treachery of Images provided a surreal way into one of my recurring frustrations with corporate purpose.

A picture of a pipe is not a pipe. And a purpose statement is not a purpose.

Statements matter, but purpose only becomes real when it influences governance, strategy, culture, investment, innovation, behaviour and performance. The challenge is not declaring a purpose. It is becoming organised by one.

The Machine Needs a North Star
The final article of the quarter considered what organisational purpose might mean in an increasingly AI-native world.

AI can optimise against an objective but humans still have to determine which objectives matter. Which is why I firmly believe purpose will become increasingly more important in the age of AI, not less.

Book Reviews

Two very different books featured in my Beyond Rhetoric series this quarter, both concerned, in their own way, with the gap between aspiration and implementation.

Our Iceberg is Melting by John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber

I returned to Kotter and Rathgeber’s deceptively simple fable about a colony of penguins confronting enormous change.

Nearly twenty years after publication, its lessons about urgency, leadership, resistance and collective action remain remarkably relevant. Knowing that change is necessary is one thing. Getting an organisation to move together is quite another.

Higher Ground by Alison Taylor

Alison Taylor offers an intelligent and refreshingly sceptical examination of corporate purpose, ethics, values and responsibility.
I agreed with much of her diagnosis. Where I wanted more was in the how. Understanding why purpose matters, and even defining what it should mean, is only the beginning. The harder task is turning it into the way an organisation actually operates.

Conversations

I also continued my Neil Gaught On Purpose: In Conversation series with two New Zealand leaders approaching purpose and performance from very different perspectives.

In Conversation with Gavin Findlay

As Chief Executive of the New Zealand Food Network, Gavin Findlay works in an organisation with an unmistakably social purpose.

What made our conversation particularly interesting was his emphasis on performance and commercial discipline. Having a worthwhile purpose does not reduce the need to run an organisation well. It makes clarity about what good performance is ultimately for even more important.

In Conversation with Julie Gill
My conversation with Best Places to Work™ Founder and CEO Julie Gill explored employee experience, culture, leadership and the connection between better workplaces and better organisational performance.

One theme stood out: People experience purpose through what an organisation actually does. They notice whether decisions, behaviours and priorities match the words. Purpose becomes credible when it is lived rather than simply communicated.

Into Q4

The final quarter of 2026 promises to be unusually rich territory for purpose.

New Zealand’s general election will dominate the public conversation, bringing questions of leadership, trust, priorities and long-term direction sharply into focus. For NG&A, the opportunity is not to enter party politics, but to examine what organisational purpose can teach us about making choices, maintaining direction and creating value when competing pressures intensify.

October will also put purpose into practice in two very different settings. NG&A is sponsoring the Purpose In Action Spotlight Award at Best Places to Work™, providing an opportunity to recognise organisations demonstrating that purpose can influence culture and performance, rather than simply sit in corporate language.

And the British New Zealand Business Association will host From Purpose Statements to Real Decisions: Building a Wellbeing Economy an event that brings together ISO37011 leading expert Victoria Hurth, Andrew Baker and my good-self for a panel discussion, hosted by Victoria Hatton. With the international standard inching towards publication, this should provide a timely platform for discussing what purpose actually means and what governing an organisation by purpose requires in practice.

It’s going to be a busy Q4!