About this series
Who Are You Accountable To? is a six-part series exploring faith not as religion or belief, but as orientation. It examines the often-unspoken systems that shape how meaning, power, and responsibility are organised at work. Moving beneath purpose statements, values frameworks, and performance culture, the series explores what replaces uncertainty when certainty is demanded, how leaders justify decisions when metrics fail, and who or what ultimately becomes the reference point for action. Across cultures, generations, and history, it asks a confronting question: when outcomes are unclear and no one is watching, what are we actually answering to, and how will those choices be remembered?
Standing at the front of the room
One of the toughest facilitations I have ever led took place in a public meeting at a special school. The government was proposing changes to funding arrangements in favour of more integrated educational environments, and I had been contracted to help gather community feedback on the proposal. After a brief opening from the client, what we call in New Zealand a “hospital pass” was delivered neatly in my direction. The phrase comes from rugby. A pass given in full knowledge that the person catching the ball is about to get hit hard. Then the client sat down. I stood at the front of the room alone.
In conversations involving learners with additional or complex support needs, language matters deeply and so does history. Many of the parents in that room were already exhausted from years spent fighting for assessments, negotiating funding thresholds, advocating for in-school support and carrying the relentless reality of care at home, often with little respite. The consultation itself was only one more layer in a much longer story of institutional navigation and emotional labour. People cried. Some yelled. Others spoke with the particular exhaustion that emerges when humans have spent too long needing to justify care in systems organised around thresholds, funding formulas and procedural logic. I was not the decision-maker. I was not even the policy architect. But for several hours I became the emotionally exposed human interface for a system asking people to trust a process whose outcomes many feared had already been determined.
I have often thought since then about how much contemporary institutional life depends upon proxy relationships. Difficult decisions are increasingly distributed through facilitators, consultants, engagement teams, middle managers and carefully worded communication plans. Institutions rarely metabolise the emotional consequences of their own decisions directly anymore. Instead, individuals become relational shock absorbers for systems attempting to preserve legitimacy while managing complexity, risk and public reaction.
The language used is often procedural and emotionally neutral, yet the experiences being navigated by the humans inside these processes are anything but neutral. Parents know when participation is real and when it is theatre. Staff know when restructures are exploratory and when they are already complete in all but announcement. Communities know when consultation is genuine and when it functions primarily as reputational insulation.
Years earlier, while already in Auckland working with another client, I unexpectedly became the only government representative able to attend a Treaty settlement meeting after flights were cancelled. There is a particular kind of existential absurdity in standing alone in a room carrying generations of institutional history and beginning, essentially, with: “Hello, I’m from the government.”
In moments like that, you are not encountered as an individual first. You arrive carrying systems, histories, promises, betrayals, and accumulated distrust that existed long before you entered the room. History enters rooms before people do. Trust does too. So does distrust. Public life is filled with moments where the formal purpose of a meeting barely contains the deeper emotional and historical realities underneath it.
Neutrality has a favourite child
Neutrality is not the absence of belief. It is belief that has been normalised enough to disappear into process. The writer and philosopher Ashkan Tashvir argues that systems always carry normative assumptions about what matters, what should be prioritised and what forms of life are considered legitimate or sustainable. Workplaces do this constantly, even when insisting they are merely operational, evidence-based or pragmatic. Every institution quietly encodes assumptions about whose discomfort matters, whose labour is invisible, what professionalism looks like, what emotions are acceptable and who is expected to adapt in order to belong.
Despite unprecedented investment in workplace wellbeing initiatives, trust in institutions across many Western democracies continues to decline. Perhaps part of the reason is that humans can feel the gap between declared values and lived behaviour. Many workplaces now speak fluently about wellbeing, inclusion, belonging and culture. Values appear on walls, websites and presentation decks. Yet values are not built through posters. They are built relationally. They emerge through behaviour, accountability, courage and the small decisions humans make when situations become uncomfortable, politically risky or inconvenient. That is when organisations become real. That is when humans quietly decide whether trust is warranted.
I remember once facilitating a leadership gathering where each member of the leadership team had been allocated a visible role. I asked one senior Māori leader to open with a karakia, a Māori prayer or ceremonial blessing commonly used to begin gatherings in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her response was immediate and sharp. She assumed I had asked only because she was Māori.
The moment stayed with me because both realities existed simultaneously. My intention had been inclusion and shared visibility. Her response emerged from accumulated histories of tokenism, representation burden and cultural expectation. Institutions often seek procedural clarity where humans are carrying layered historical experiences.
The same pattern appears elsewhere in subtler ways. I once watched an organisation encourage a gender-diverse staff member to help establish a network group “for their community.” The suggestion was framed positively, even progressively. Yet sitting in the room, I remember thinking: what if they do not want to become symbolic infrastructure for the organisation? What if they simply want to do their job without also carrying responsibility for the institution’s evolving understanding of inclusion? Systems often redistribute the labour of inclusion back onto the very people already carrying the greatest burden of adaptation within them.
The things humans learn to absorb
I have spent much of my career working around institutions, public processes and organisational systems. Over time, you begin noticing the small negotiations humans make in order to belong.
Driving recently with my daughter, we passed a tradesman’s van with the side door open, revealing a near life-sized image of a naked woman fixed to the interior paneling. I remember thinking how unremarkable that would have seemed in many of the male-dominated environments surrounding my childhood. My father owned an autobody shop. Calendars, jokes and casual objectification formed part of the cultural wallpaper of many workplaces at the time. Yet sitting beside my daughter, the image landed differently. Not shocking exactly. But revealing.
It was a reminder that normativity shifts unevenly across generations, industries, professions and places. What becomes acceptable, who adapts and whose comfort is prioritised are never neutral questions. Even language drifts culturally. Swearing that once marked rebellion now passes almost unnoticed through executive meetings, strategy workshops and public-sector discussions. Curiously, one of the few places I have worked recently where almost nobody swore was a boxing academy. The contrast felt oddly reassuring.
Human cultures rarely evolve in linear ways. The longer I work with institutions, the more I suspect people can tolerate difficulty far longer than incoherence. Humans are remarkably capable of navigating hard decisions when they believe the process is honest, the burden is shared and the relationships remain intact. What breaks people is often something quieter. It is the growing feeling that participation requires performance.
Participation or theatre
I saw this repeatedly while working alongside organisational restructures. By the time they were publicly framed as process improvement exercises, the relational consequences were often already unfolding beneath the surface. Officially, the language remained strategic, procedural and future-focused. But humans experience restructures through entirely different questions: Who already knows? Who is protected? Who becomes expendable? What happens to the relationships we built here?
Modern organisations frequently underestimate how much trust is stored relationally rather than structurally. The people you build relationships with matter. The colleague who once sat beside you matters. The manager who suddenly becomes procedural matters. The person who stops making eye contact in the corridor matters.
Humans remember when systems stop behaving humanely long before institutions recognise the cost themselves. Perhaps this is partly why so many people now feel psychologically tired inside modern organisational life. Not simply overworked, but fragmented.
Swipe cards, passwords, guest access zones, hot desks, endless compliance modules and carefully managed communication strategies all promise coordination, security and efficiency. Yet many workplaces increasingly feel emotionally thin. People email colleagues sitting one desk away. Meetings occur through muted squares on screens while exhaustion quietly accumulates beneath professional performance. Institutions continue functioning operationally while relational trust erodes almost invisibly underneath them. The human nervous system knows the difference between participation and theatre.
Trust is a human technology
This is not an argument against institutions. Quite the opposite. I remain deeply pro-institutional life. I believe public institutions, schools, local government, businesses, hospitals, universities and community organisations matter enormously. Human civilisation depends upon our ability to cooperate at scale. Still, institutions are never merely operational structures. They are relational environments that shape human identity, behaviour and meaning over time. The deeper question is not whether systems contain values. They always do. The question is whether we are honest enough to examine what forms of humanity our systems currently require, reward and quietly erode in the process.
Trust is not built through branding exercises, strategic language or values posters alone. Trust is built when humans believe difficulty is being carried honestly. It emerges when participation is real, power is acknowledged openly and relationships remain recognisably human even inside complexity. Humans can survive uncertainty remarkably well. What they struggle to survive is sustained incoherence.
Perhaps this is what accountability inside institutional life really means: remaining recognisably human while participating in systems powerful enough to make people forget themselves. Institutions do not lose trust because humans expect perfection from them. They lose trust when the distance between what is said publicly and what is lived privately becomes too large to metabolise honestly anymore.
Faith is not certainty. It is the willingness to act with integrity without guarantees. Trust works much the same way. That is what modern institutions seem quietly starved of now.
Dr Jordan Marijana Alexander works at the intersection of identity, leadership, and organisational systems. She is the co-founder of RelateAble.Global. If this series has surfaced questions for you as a leader, or raised challenges you are navigating within your organisation or your own life, she welcomes thoughtful conversation or inquiry. You can follow DrJMA on LinkedIn and Engenesis.