Here's a humbling thing to internalise early in a project: it matters enormously to you, and barely at all to most of the people whose help you need. Your project is the centre of your universe. To the platform team, the finance approver, the other squad whose roadmap you're about to disrupt, it's one of forty things competing for attention this week. The sooner you accept that, the more value you'll create — for them and for you.
The manifesto calls this creating shared value, and asks for an inclusive, humble approach in recognition that your project, whilst valuable to you, sits inside a larger system of people with their own priorities.
Ceremony is value performed at people
The opposite of shared value is ceremony — process performed for its own sake, or to be seen doing process. The status report nobody reads. The sign-off gate that adds a week and catches nothing. The meeting whose real function is to distribute blame in advance. Ceremony has the shape of collaboration without the substance. It's value performed at people rather than created with them.
Ceremony accretes because it feels safe and looks diligent. But it's a tax, and like all taxes it's paid by everyone and noticed by no one until it's crushing. Every ritual that doesn't create value is borrowing time and goodwill from the people forced to attend it.
An inclusive and humble approach, in recognition that your project, whilst having value, is one of many.
Build with, not at
Shared value is the practical alternative, and it starts from the humility above. If your project is one of forty things on someone's plate, the way to get their genuine help isn't to demand it through process. It's to make working with you worth their while — to find the version of your goal that also moves theirs.
This is real, not a platitude. The platform team will fast-track the integration that also reduces their support load. The finance approver will move quickly for the person who brought them a clean, honest request instead of a surprise. The other squad will accommodate the change that you shaped together rather than dropping on them. Shared value is just the discovery that the highest-leverage move is usually the one that's good for someone else too.
Humility is strategic, not just nice
I want to be careful not to make this sound like a morality lecture. Humility here is cold strategy. The arrogant project — the one that assumes its importance entitles it to everyone's time — burns the relationships it depends on and gets quietly deprioritised by the very people who could have unblocked it. The humble project, which shows up acknowledging it's one of many and looks for the win-win, accumulates goodwill that pays out exactly when things get hard.
You can feel the difference in how a project moves through an organisation. The arrogant one grinds against friction at every boundary. The humble one slides, because people want to help it.
Cut the ceremony, keep the connection
So the discipline is two-sided. Ruthlessly cut the ceremony — the rituals that perform collaboration without creating value. And invest, equally ruthlessly, in the real thing: understanding what the people around you need, and building in a way that gives them some of it. Less theatre, more shared interest.
Your project isn't the centre of the universe. Build like you know that, and you'll be amazed how much of the universe decides to help.
