Aligned Values: Moving Mountains and Navigating Change

By the time the recording light blinked on, confusion was already in the room. Frank was confused. Natalie was half-visible at the far end of her living room in Seoul. Someone had moved a table. Someone had changed a plug. Someone else had disappeared entirely—then reappeared, cheerfully, like a magician who’d forgotten the order of their tricks.

Which, in its own way, was the perfect opening for a Lunch conversation about values.

Because values, as it turns out, rarely announce themselves neatly. They show up sideways—through frustration, loyalty, silence, ambition, panic, honesty, and the quiet feeling afterward that says: this was right, even if it was hard.

Generations at the Table

Frank began where many of these lunches begin: with a story that sounds personal but lands somewhere universal. After nearly a year of feeling gently—but persistently—edged out by a younger generation at work, he found himself in unfamiliar territory. Not angry. Not defeated. Just… displaced.

“Youth has plenty of energy and they think they have all the answers,” Bruce reflected. “The older generation has no energy and doesn’t even really know what the questions are.”

It wasn’t bitterness. It was honesty. And, unexpectedly, relief.

In a very specific project with Janita—Fruitloop to those in the know—Frank had made a values-based decision that would once have felt unthinkable: he stepped back. Not because he couldn’t contribute, but because he knew he would get it wrong. The questions had changed. The tools had changed. The person on the other side of the table had changed.

And instead of forcing relevance, he chose trust.

That choice—quiet, ego-light, deeply generous—set the tone for everything that followed.

Honesty Under Pressure

When Janita posed the first question of the morning—Can you think of a time when you followed your values and felt calm afterward?—Rosii’s story arrived gently, carefully translated, and emotionally precise.

Caught between two supervisors, two meetings, and not enough hours in the day, she did the thing her mother taught her to do: she told the truth.

It didn’t land well.

One supervisor was angry. Another suggested she didn’t need to say everything. “Select your words,” she was advised. Not lying, exactly. Just… not telling.

Rosii wrestled with that. Was she naïve? Or just transparent?

As she spoke—from São Paulo to listeners across four continents—the group did what this table does best. They listened. They didn’t rush to fix. They didn’t correct her English or her emotions. They treated her experience as significant, because it was.

Frank named the real culprit quietly: pressure. The kind that slides down hierarchies and lands hardest on the person trying to do the right thing. And in that moment, trust itself became a value enacted, not discussed.

Values in Uniform—and Out of It

The conversation widened, as it often does, into stories of systems and structures. Natalie spoke about how living in Seoul had reinforced her values by contrasting them with others. Patience. Waiting. Observing.

Frank brought in the military perspective—where values are paradoxically both absolute and conditional. On duty, you obey legal orders, even at great personal risk. Off duty, shared humanity returns. Camaraderie fills the space where hierarchy stood moments before.

Bruce added another layer: leadership, trust, and responsibility. On an aircraft carrier, the captain is responsible for the ship—but the person on the deck is responsible for the landing aircraft. Values there aren’t slogans. They’re operational. Lives depend on them.

Which led, inevitably, to leadership today—where decisions are often made far from the front line, and blame travels faster than learning.

Panic Buttons and Gut Voices

Then came the Fruitloop questions. The ones that disarm seriousness just enough to let truth slip through.

If your values had a remote control, what button would you keep pressing by accident?

“Panic,” Bruce admitted, without hesitation.

“Loyalty,” said Fruitloop. Loyalty to the wrong things. For too long. A value that had served her—and cost her.

And when asked what their gut feelings would shout if they could send a voice note, the answers were telling. “Stop thinking.” “Listen more.” “Speak only what is necessary.” “You’ve got this.”

Ambition showed up too—not as arrogance, but as momentum. As belief. As energy aligned with purpose.

Moving Mountains (Carefully)

Somewhere between a tea infuser shaped like a tiny body, a story about an underground Korean shopping mall, and a WhatsApp status update that gave Frank goosebumps, the meeting circled back to its quiet centre.

Aligned values don’t make life easy. They make it possible.

They help people step back when stepping forward would do harm. They help others speak up when silence would be easier. They don’t erase conflict—but they give it a shared language.

“If values are aligned,” Frank said near the end, distilling eleven months into one sentence, “people can move mountains.”

Not quickly. Not loudly. But together.

And maybe that’s the real work of Lunch—not solving anything, not agreeing on everything, but creating a space where people can be human, imperfect, thoughtful, and heard.

Same time. Same place. Coffee still warm. Jackets still on. Questions still open.