The Ethosystem

The Execution Era is Ending

The software engineer who once spent their day writing code now spends it articulating what they want and evaluating what comes back. The product manager who drafted feature specifications now judges whether the AI's interpretation captured the real intent. The designer who pushed pixels reviews a dozen variations, distinguishing great from merely good.

AI agents are becoming a reliable way to get work done. They can write production code, draft customer communications, analyze market data, and generate designs. The bottleneck has shifted. The constraint is no longer "how do we execute this?" but "what judgment should guide what we build?"

This isn't about whether AI can do the work. It increasingly can. It's about knowing what work is worth doing and recognizing quality when you see it. That knowledge lives in your people, and the collection of it is your ethosystem.

The Ethosystem: Your Company's Judgment Apparatus

A company's ethos is the underlying values and beliefs that guide how it operates. We define an ethosystem as a combination of your company's ethos and the system through which these values get applied. Your company's ethosystem is the complete collection of judgment living in your organization. It includes your stated goals and documented values, yes, but it's far richer and more complex than any written artifact can capture.

It's the product manager who knows when "fast enough" beats "perfect." The support lead who can distinguish a customer who needs education from one who's found a real gap in your product. The engineer who sees when technical debt is strategic versus when it's just lazy. The executive who feels when a market opportunity aligns with who you really are as a company.

These judgments encompass goals, values, and culture, but also tastes, priorities, and biases. They include what you've explicitly decided and what you've revealed through a thousand small decisions. Most of your ethosystem is tacit. It lives in people's minds, not documents. It's the context that makes a decision obvious to someone who's been at the company for three years but baffling to someone who joined last week.

Written goals and values statements are useful, but they're lossy compressions of the real thing. They capture the peaks, but the topology of your judgment landscape is vastly more complex. "Move fast" means something different at a hardware company than a software company, something different in regulated industries than startups, something different when you're the market leader versus the upstart. Your ethosystem holds all those nuances.

The Tacit Power and Problem

The richness of your ethosystem is both its power and its problem. Tacit knowledge is hard to transfer and harder to scale. You can't simply hand someone a document called "How We Think About Quality" and expect them to make decisions the way your founding team would. We should take heart in knowing that this dimension of our workforce is beyond the reach of AI. Value judgment remains a distinctly human domain.

The challenges around the company's ethosystem grow exponentially with organizational scale. Every new person adds not just their own judgment to the system, but new connections to align. A five-person company operates as one tightly-coupled judgment system. A fifty-person company has judgment fragmented across teams, functions, and geographies. By five hundred, you've built entire mechanisms (planning cycles, approval chains, review processes) just to maintain some coherence in what you collectively decide matters.

The traditional business technique was to slow down. Hire carefully. Invest in onboarding. Build strong culture. Create review layers. Hope that over time, through exposure and osmosis, people internalize "how we do things here."

But with AI agents, more work can happen in far shorter periods of time. And this capabiltiy demands more judgment, more decisions, more direction from the employees. AI agents, in this way are in a sense greedy for the organization's judgment and decisions. The balance has shifted: the organization now possesses significantly more executional capacity than judgment capacity. Suddenly the tacit problem becomes the bottleneck.

The Human Role: Deciders, Not Doers

In this emerging world, humans organize differently. Roles used to be defined by execution capability: "I write code," "I design interfaces," "I manage campaigns." Now roles center on judgment domains.

You become trusted in an area. Trusted to distinguish great from good from bad. The engineer becomes the technical judgment authority: is this architecture sound? The designer becomes the taste authority: does this feel right? The analyst becomes the insight authority: what does this data really mean?

This isn't delegation. It's something more fundamental. Your ethosystem IS the work now. Developing it, refining it, making it legible enough to guide AI agents while keeping it rich enough to capture real judgment: that's what you're building.

Winning in the long term will have less to do with how much knowledge or reasoning companies can leverage through AI tools. Success instead will come to companies whose ethosystem is most sophisticated, most coherent, and most effectively activated.

Your New Competitive Advantage

When fast execution becomes table stakes, what differentiates a company is the quality of judgment guiding that execution. Your ethosystem shapes what you build, and what you build serves your customers. The relationship is direct: ethosystem quality → product quality → customer value.

A strong ethosystem makes better decisions about what to build, when to ship, which customers to serve, what quality bar to hold, where to invest. It's your company's actual intelligence, distributed across your people.

And unlike execution capability, which AI is rapidly commoditizing, a well-developed ethosystem is deeply defensible. It's specific to your context, accumulated through experience, refined through success and failure. Competitors can copy your product. They can hire away your engineers. They can't clone your ethosystem.

Building for This Future

The challenge ahead isn't primarily technical. It's about making tacit judgment legible where that helps while preserving its richness. It's about creating new mechanisms for collaborating on judgment: for debating what good looks like, for documenting not just what you decided but why, for helping people develop discernment in their domains.

Some judgment will become explicit: decision criteria, evaluation rubrics, example comparisons. Much will remain tacit: intuition, taste, feel.

At Convictional, we're noticing these changes and trying to become aware of and leverage our own ethosystem. As a remote, async company (see our handbook) we have started to use a lot of tools, including our own software, to move more of our ethosystem from tacit to explicit knowledge. We encourage respectful disagreement and debate. We have all become students of decision theory, including how to be aware of the biases that inevitably creep in to decision work. While we didn't have a name for it until now, working on our ethosystem has become the main type of work as we build our product for our customers.