100 million people working sovereignly.

To us, sovereignty means working with autonomy, creativity, respect, passion, and a shared purpose.

Reaching this goal seems like it will take many people working many lifetimes to accomplish. So we set this out as an aspirational reach. We believe in the awesome power of Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals (aka BHAGs) to galvanize like-minded people towards something that is bigger than any one individual. It is a pursuit that is intrinsically valuable.

We know we are not the first to care about this, and we certainly hope we are not the last. We recognize that we are standing on the shoulders of giants in this work that we are doing. In addition to the power of BHAGs, there are many other beliefs that this goal is rooted in.

At Human First Works, we believe that:

• Work, in its current form, is broken and that broken work is breaking our society.
• Good, smart people can fix almost anything given enough time and resources.
• Everyone is smart in some way, and most people will skew towards good when given the opportunity.
• The best way to solve hard problems is to bring more leadership out amongst people.
• Leadership potential needs to be protected at every level, including from the highest level.
• The best way to bring leadership out in people is to set up systems where any number of people can step up as a leader and stepping up as a leader is the path of least resistance.
• Most decisions are best made with strong input from the people closest to the problem or ideally solved by the people experiencing the problem (or tension).