Your brand is not who you are. Identity is who you are. Brand is a subset of your identity. Your brand is the bits of your identity that you want to share with the world. It's how you want to be seen. If your brand and identity are out of alignment, it’s an organisational disaster waiting to happen.

At its core, identity is found in the answers to very simple questions like what do you do? and what’s your value? You’d think we’d be really good at answering fundamental questions like these, but most of us struggle to make small talk at a barbeque, let alone define our organisation’s identity.

Most organisations get their 'vision' and 'purpose' wrong. A vision only has value in terms of strategy - it helps to bind successive strategies together, so that you stay on track to achieve that vision. It's the same with your purpose. No organisation or person has one single purpose that drives them. Life is more complicated than that.

Organisations consistently make the same mistake. We are in such a rush to communicate something that we never take the time to fully understand what we are trying to communicate. The result is we get it wrong and create confusion where there shouldn't be any.

Language is everything. Words not only express what we think, but they also shape how we think. So much so, that the most effective way to change organisational behaviour is to change the organisational language!

The biggest problem for any organisation is no one knows what to say. Rather than try to figure it out, they tend to copy someone else’s attempt. As a result, much of what organisations communicate is derivative, generic and, ultimately, wrong.

Language constantly evolves and changes. There are no universal meanings for words that we can rely on. We have to explain our context - what we mean - because if we don’t someone else is going to decide what we mean for us.