Most of us learn a simple rule before we can read: when words and actions clash, children often take their cue from what adults do. You can say “be gentle” in your calmest voice while you slam the cupboard, but the slam is the stronger lesson. You can tell them to sit still at dinner while you look at your phone under the table, but the phone gives them another rule to follow. Every parent runs this test without meaning to. The words still matter, but the behaviour can change what those words mean.

We carry the same rule into work. We do not learn the real culture from the values on the wall or slide deck alone. We watch who gets promoted, which projects get money, what gets cut, and what happens to the person who speaks up. We read the choices because the choices tell us how the place really works.

Then we sit down to reach a customer and forget the rule. We write a sentence, place it on a slide, and call it a position. We put it on the home page, ask the whole company to use it, and wait for the market to believe it.

But the customer is doing what our children do and what we do at work. They are comparing the claim with what happens.

Children keep score

Children learn a great deal from words. They learn the names of things because someone tells them. They learn about places they have never seen and events that happened before they were born. Yet children do not trust every speaker in the same way. They pay attention to who has been right before.

In a 2004 study, three-and four-year-old children met two adults. One adult named common objects correctly, while the other named them incorrectly. The adults then gave different names to an object the children had never seen. The children who could tell which adult was reliable then preferred that adult’s name for the new object. Children who could not tell the speakers apart by reliability did not show the same preference.

The children who spotted the difference kept score. A new word did not stand alone; it arrived with the past record of the person who said it.

An older set of studies made the point even clearer. In 1970, James Bryan and Nancy Walbek studied children and giving. The children watched an adult talk about being generous or selfish, and they also watched what the adult chose to give. What the adult did changed what the children later gave. What the adult preached had little effect on their giving. The children were not ignoring all words. They were choosing the stronger clue. In these giving experiments, when speech and behaviour did not match, behaviour had more effect on what the children did.

That is not just a cute lesson for parents. It is one way we judge other people. We ask whether someone has been right before, whether they follow the rule they gave us, and what they chose when the choice was hard. We may not ask those questions out loud, but the answers still shape our trust.

The habit starts early, and adults use it too. Still, the honest rule is not that actions always beat words. Later research shows that children combine what adults say, what adults do, and what happens next. Words can add real force when they match the behaviour. The point is that words do not arrive alone. People weigh them against the other evidence they can see.

The document no one wrote

Walk into any company and watch what people read. They may open the culture deck once, but they read the decisions every day. They notice whose plan gets money and whose plan is left to die. They see who gets the best work, who gets moved to the side, what the boss cheers, and what the boss allows.

This is the real company handbook. It updates every week, no one has to send it around, and it has never been written down.

Chris Argyris and Donald Schön gave this gap useful names. They said there is an “espoused theory” and a “theory-in-use.” The espoused theory is the rule you say you follow. The theory-in-use is the rule people can see in what you do.

Edgar Schein, another major scholar of company culture, made a similar point. He wrote that leaders teach culture through what they pay attention to, measure, fund, reward, and control. Hiring, promotion, and dismissal also show people what the company values. Formal statements matter, but they are only one signal among many.

The values slide is the espoused theory. The promotions are the theory-in-use.

A deck may say, “We reward bold risks.” If the last three people who took a bold risk lost their jobs, the team knows the real rule: play safe. The deck may say, “The customer comes first.” If support is cut each quarter while the sales team keeps growing, the team learns another rule: the customer comes after the sale. A leader may tell people to share bad news early, but if bad news gets punished while good news earns a bonus, everyone learns which kind of truth is welcome.

The hard part is that the leader may mean every word in the deck. This is not always a lie in the simple sense. A leader can truly believe the stated rule while running the company by another one. The leader lives inside their intent, while everyone else lives inside the result.

What we call culture is the pile of those results. It is “how things get done here.” It is the story that forms after people watch the same kind of choice happen again and again.

The strange flip

Now comes the strange part. The same leader who reads actions at work starts to believe in words when facing the market. They know that employees do not learn the true values of a company from a poster, yet they expect customers to learn the true value of the company from an ad.

So they pay for a new line: “We put people first.” “We are built on trust.” “We care more.” “We are changing the future.” The words may be clear, and they may even be true in the leader’s heart. But the customer does not live in the leader’s heart. The customer lives inside the result.

Cut the service team, add a bot, hide the phone number, and make a refund take six weeks. Your customer has now learned something about you. You can spend the whole ad budget saying that you are human, but the service choice has already spoken.

The ad cannot erase the choice. It can only place a claim beside it. When the two match, the words can help by giving a name to what the customer has already seen. When they clash, the words can do extra harm. The customer may think you are lying, or they may think you do not know what your own company did. Neither answer helps you.

This risk has been tested. In a 2009 series of studies, researchers showed people company statements about social responsibility along with company behaviour that did not match. The conflict raised the sense that the company was being false, hurt views of the company, and sometimes made its own statements work against it. A claim beside a clear contradiction is not harmless. It can draw a bright line around the gap.

Think about the double rule. You trust actions when the actions are aimed at you. You read your child’s behaviour, your boss’s behaviour, your partner’s behaviour, and the behaviour of a company that has your money. Then you aim words at a customer and hope their mind works in a way yours never has. Why would their guard turn off when yours does not?

What gives a choice its weight

An action is not magic. It gains weight from what it puts at risk. A claim is easy to make, and most claims can be changed by Tuesday. A rival can copy them by Friday. A real choice is harder because it can close a door, cost money, turn away a buyer, or make the next choice harder to escape.

That is why the choice carries more news.

In 2018, a team of researchers studied a program that helped people add solar panels to their homes. The program used local people to speak with their neighbours. Some of those local helpers had installed solar panels on their own homes, while others had not.

The community organizers who had installed solar through the program recruited 62.8% more residents to install through it than organizers who had not. The researchers then tested the same idea in three planned experiments with 1,805 people. Those results supported the main finding and the reason behind it: the action changed what people believed about the organizer’s faith in solar power.

The action helped show that the speaker believed the claim. The speaker had paid before asking someone else to believe.

We need to be careful, though, because cost alone proves nothing. A company can spend a great deal of money on a bad idea. It can make a brave choice that no customer wants, or stay true to a plan long after the plan has failed. Pain is not proof of wisdom.

The useful question is not, “Did this cost a lot?” It is, “Would this be harder for the wrong kind of company to keep doing?”

Any company can print the words “customer first.” Now add a simple promise: if the company fails, the customer gets their money back with one click. That promise has teeth because each failure costs the company money. Any company can claim “quality.” Now watch one reject a large order because it cannot meet its own standard. The lost sale says more than the word.

The strongest choices sort companies. They are easier for a company that truly holds the belief to keep making, and harder for a company that only wants the look of that belief. A choice costs something. A deck costs one prompt. That is why people do not read them in the same way.

But words can build worlds

There is a fair objection to this argument: humans use words to build much of the world. Yuval Noah Harari is known for making this point in a big way. Money, nations, laws, and companies all depend on shared stories. A dollar has value because many people believe others will accept it. A company exists because workers, buyers, banks, courts, and governments all behave as though it exists.

These things are not fake in the sense of being useless. They move money, shape lives, and can last for hundreds of years. In Homo Deus, Harari calls them “intersubjective” realities. They do not live in one mind. They live between many minds.

Words can therefore do far more than report the world. Sometimes they help make the world. But notice who does the making. You can write a story alone; you cannot make it shared alone.

You can say that your company stands for trust, but you cannot place that link inside a customer’s head. You cannot make employees repeat it in private, force rivals to plan around it, or make the market give it back to you as fact. That part belongs to everyone else.

A position works like a shared reality.

Take the idea that Volvo means safety. “Volvo is safety” is not a hard fact like the weight of a car, but it is also not just a line in a Volvo ad. In a 2011 American survey by Consumer Reports, 70% of consumers named Volvo the leader in safety. Ford came second at 20%. Whatever Volvo had said about itself, the link was now living in the market. The idea was shared, so the idea had force.

This is where words and actions meet. Actions do not replace the story; they pay for the story to travel. They make it safe enough to repeat, clear enough to recall, and hard enough to copy that it stays linked to one company.

You write the description. The market decides whether it becomes real.

How a position is created

A position does not begin with a tagline, copywriting, messaging or words. Here is my model for how one forms. I break the process into eight steps. The company controls the work in the first six, while the market controls the result in the last two.

1. Conviction

A founder begins with a standard before there is proof that it will work. This belief matters, but it is still free. It can change, and no one outside the company can see it. At this stage, conviction is a private preference rather than public evidence.

2. Concept

The company chooses one idea to build around. One noun can guide a company: safety, speed, freedom, or care. A list of pleasant words is not a choice; it is a wish list. Many positioning projects I have seen stop here. They pick the words and start writing, even though the words have not earned anything yet.

3. Sacrifice

Now the company gives something up. It turns down a type of customer, kills a product that still makes money, or says no to growth that would weaken its standard. Before this point, the idea was a preference. Now it has a receipt.

4. Structure

The company bends the business around the concept. The concept begins to shape what it sells, how it makes money, what it owns, who it hires, and how facts move through the company. There is a simple test for structure: if the word vanished tomorrow, would anything in the business have to change? If the answer is no, the word was decoration.

5. Proof

The company gathers facts that a stranger can check. Instead of saying, “We care,” it shows the wait time, the refund, what was fixed, and who else is willing to speak for it. It uses verbs, numbers, and receipts. The strongest proof does not need the company’s permission to be true.

6. Repetition

The same pattern then appears again and again. It will not show up in every tiny choice because no company is perfect. It must appear in enough important places, for long enough, that people can tell what kind of company this is. This is not a campaign. It is years of not proving yourself wrong. Those first six steps belong to the company. It can fund them, plan them, check them, and hold leaders to them. Then its control ends.

7. Association

The customer starts to link the company with the concept. This happens inside the customer’s mind and on the customer’s time. The company can give people good reasons to form the link, but it cannot install it.

8. Position

At last, the market treats the company and the concept as the same thing. The link begins to feel plain, and people may not even know when they learned it. The position has been granted. This is why changing the words fails so often. Companies redo step two, skip steps three through six, and then wonder why steps seven and eight never arrive. They changed the label without changing the pattern.

Why smart companies keep buying words

If this rule is so old, why do smart companies keep missing it? Part of the answer is simple: words are easy to sell.

A workshop has a start and an end. A deck can have a price. A line can be approved, and a new home page can launch next month. Changing the business is harder. It may mean giving up sales, changing who holds power, closing a product line, or sticking with a choice for years. It may be the work of ten leaders rather than one adviser.

The market sells what it can wrap, so it wraps words and calls the package a position.

The buyer wants this answer too. A wording problem feels safe because it says the company is sound but poorly explained. A decision problem is not safe. It says the company may be explaining itself just fine. Customers may understand it and still say no.

Argyris and Schön offer another way to see the trap. They wrote about single-loop and double-loop learning. Think of a heater. When the room gets cold, it turns on; when the room gets warm, it turns off. It fixes the gap, but it never asks whether the chosen heat is right. That is one loop. The second loop asks the deeper question: why was the heat set there in the first place?

Now watch a company when sales fall. It buys a new line, message, site, or deck. Each attempt protects one belief: the customer is reading the words, and better words will fix the problem. The heater keeps working to hold a number that no one has checked.

The second loop asks a harder question: what if the customer understood us? What if they read our choices and did not believe our claim? That question points away from the sentence and toward what the company funds, builds, rewards, and refuses. The answer costs more, which is why it is asked less.

Words still have a job

None of this means words are worthless. Clear words help people understand. They help teams make the same choice, help customers name what they have seen, and help a true pattern travel faster.

Words also work well when both sides want the same thing. A map can guide you. A clear set of steps can help you fix a chair. A doctor can explain a test, and a friend can warn you about a hole in the road.

The problem is not words. The problem is a claim made by a speaker who benefits if you believe it, and who pays no price for being wrong. That kind of claim needs support.

A company can also turn a word into a choice. It can make a public promise with a real price for failure, give the buyer a simple way to verify the claim, and embed the promise in the product, the pay plan, and the firm’s rules. The word is no longer sitting above the business. It is running through it.

The true line was never words against actions — it was cheap claims against earned belief. Words come last because their best job is to name what the business has already made true.

The test

You already know how to run the test. You have never judged your child only by their promise; you watch what they do. You have never learned the real rules at work from the values slide alone; you watch what leaders reward. In two rooms out of three, you are a sharp reader of action. Turn that skill on the third room.

Take your company and remove every word it has used to describe itself. Remove the home page, the deck, the tagline, and the values. Now read what is left.

What did you fund, and what did you cut?
Who did you hire, and who did you let go?
What did you ship, and what did you refuse to ship?
What money did you turn down to protect a standard?
What did you promise when failure would hurt?

What one concept do those choices prove without anyone telling the story for you?

If a clear pattern appears, you may have the start of a position. You must still ask whether people want it, because a clear pattern can point at a need no one has. Cost does not make a bad idea good. You must also ask whether the pattern has lasted long enough for other people to see it.

If no pattern appears, you do not have a wording problem. You have choices pointing in different directions, and no line can pull them into one.

Your customer is already running this test. That was never yours to control. The only thing you control is whether the pattern they find is one you chose, or one you allowed to form while you were polishing its description.

Your children learned this before they could read. Your workers never forgot it. Your customers know it too. You are the only one in the room still hoping the words will save you.

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Uncover your position

Before you hire a messaging consultant to wordsmith your homepage, or an agency to “refresh your brand,” or someone to fix what they’ll call positioning (but is really just tactical framing), try this first.

The CEO Clarity Starter Kit

It does exactly what we just read. It helps you find and own your noun.

What you do:

• Run the Position Audit (reveals what noun you might already own without knowing it)
• Complete the 8-Question Advisor (the same questions that would surface “weightlessness” for Ramp)
• Feed the output into Pablo (included)

What you get:

• Your noun. The concept you can actually own, not just claim
• A 4-Level Positioning Canvas showing how to move from saying it to OWNING it
• Pablo translates your position into landing pages, offers, and LinkedIn profiles (written in your buyer’s voice, not consultant-speak)
• A 30-day positioning course so you can apply this method without me

Time required: About an hour (less time than reading three more case studies about tactics that won’t work without position)

Who’s used it: 500+ CEOs and founders who were tired of pushing uphill

Investment: Starts from $249 USD

Most realize they don’t need the consultant or agency after this. Or they need far less than they thought. Because once you know your noun (your position), the tactics become obvious. The distribution chooses itself. The customers explain you better than you explain yourself.

And yes, if you buy the kit, it nudges me closer to that Porsche in the photo. Thanks in advance for supporting excellent positioning and questionable life choices.

Stop competing on features. Start owning concepts.

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