The Compass and the Terrain
What Purpose Stability in Teenagers Reveals About Leadership and Organisational Identity
New research from Cornell University challenges us to rethink purpose — not as a fixed trait, but as a dynamic, living force. For those who work at the intersection of systems psychodynamics and organisational life, the implications are profound.
We live in a moment of extraordinary anxiety. Across the world, individuals, institutions, and entire societies are wrestling with a destabilising question: what are we actually for? Organisations that once offered coherent identities — a sense of collective mission that oriented daily effort and sustained people through difficulty — find themselves adrift. Trust in institutions is at historic lows. Hybrid work has fractured the social containers through which shared purpose was once transmitted. Technological disruption, geopolitical turbulence, and the accelerating pace of AI transformation have left many employees — and many leaders — in a state of chronic purposive flux, oscillating between moments of clear direction and stretches of hollow going-through-the-motions.
In this context, a newly published study from Cornell University lands with quiet but considerable force. Its subject is adolescents. Its implications reach far beyond them.
Purpose Is Not a Fixed Star
Anthony Burrow, the Ferris Family Associate Professor of Life Course Studies in Cornell’s Department of Psychology, and his colleague Kaylin Ratner have done something deceptively simple: they measured purpose not once, but every day, for ten weeks, across a national sample of more than 320 high-school students. The result is a study that dismantles one of the field’s most comfortable assumptions.
Most prior research on purpose has treated it as a trait — something you either have or you don’t, measurable in a single snapshot survey. Burrow and Ratner’s study, published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence, reveals instead that purpose fluctuates day to day, in ways that matter enormously for wellbeing and self-esteem. And the finding that most arrests attention is not about the intensity of purpose — how strongly a young person reports feeling purposeful at any one moment — but about its stability. Teens who experienced purpose more consistently, with fewer wild swings, fared significantly better on measures of wellbeing.
“Perhaps a stable sense of purpose operates like a compass: it may keep adolescents generally oriented but cannot prevent occasional undulations in terrain from steering them off course.” — Burrow & Ratner
The compass metaphor is telling. A compass does not eliminate difficult terrain; it does not prevent storms, exhaustion, or wrong turns. What it provides is something more fundamental: a reliable orientation, a steady return to direction. The adolescents who thrived were not those who burned most intensely with purpose on their best days. They were those who maintained the most even, consistent purposive signal across all their days — including the hard ones.
Through the Lens of Systems Psychodynamics
For those working within the tradition of systems psychodynamics — the theoretical and applied field that draws on psychoanalytic insight, open systems theory, and the study of group life — this research resonates with something well understood in the consulting room and the boardroom alike: that the organisations and groups we inhabit are powerful modulators of our inner experience.
Wilfred Bion’s concept of containment — the capacity of a group, institution, or leader to receive, metabolise, and return the projected anxieties of their members in a more bearable form — illuminates why purpose stability matters beyond the individual. In a group with strong containment, members can tolerate uncertainty without defaulting to fight-flight or dependency. Purpose, in this reading, is not merely a cognitive orientation. It is also a form of psychological holding. When it is reliable and consistent, it reduces the persecutory anxiety that makes people defensive, regressed, and unable to think. When it swings wildly — inflated by grandiose visions one quarter, hollowed out by restructuring the next — it actively undermines the group’s capacity to work.
D.W. Winnicott’s concept of the “holding environment” extends this further. For Winnicott, healthy development depends on an environment that is reliably present, predictably responsive, and able to survive the infant’s — or in organisational terms, the employee’s — moments of rage, despair, and disintegration. An organisation’s stated purpose can function as part of that holding environment, provided it is genuine, consistent, and lived rather than merely laminated. Purpose as performance — the glossy values poster on the wall, the town hall speech that bears no relation to Monday’s decisions — is not holding. It is its opposite: a false-self organisational structure that generates cynicism and disconnection.
The Role of the “Champion”: Leadership as Container
There is a detail in the Cornell study that deserves particular attention for leadership practitioners. The research was conducted in partnership with GripTape, a nonprofit that pairs students with an adult “champion” — a mentor who checks in regularly on the student’s self-directed learning journey. Among participants, students reported feeling most purposeful on the days they met with their champion.
The parallel with leadership is not subtle. The champion is not directing the student’s work; the student themselves has chosen their learning challenge, owns the process, shapes the goals. What the champion provides is something more structural: a reliable relational presence that re-anchors the student’s sense of meaningful agency. In the language of systems psychodynamics, the champion functions as a container — not absorbing the student’s autonomy, but holding the space in which that autonomy can be sustained and made sense of.
The most important thing a leader may do for organisational purpose is not to articulate it more loudly, but to hold it more steadily.
This challenges some dominant assumptions about purpose-driven leadership. The emphasis in much of the contemporary leadership literature is on inspiration — on leaders who articulate purpose with passion, who cast compelling visions, who ignite their followers’ sense of meaning. The Cornell data suggests this may be only half the story, and perhaps the less important half. What matters more than the heat of purpose is its constancy. A leader who inspires brilliantly but inconsistently — whose own purposive signal fluctuates with market conditions, board pressure, or personal anxiety — may inadvertently transmit that variability to the system around them.
In systems psychodynamic terms, this is the leader operating from the basic assumption rather than from the work group. Under stress, leaders may unconsciously seek the group’s dependency, or project their own purposive confusion into the organisation, creating the very instability they fear. The containing leader, by contrast, does the internal work to maintain purposive orientation even when the terrain is difficult — not because they are invulnerable to doubt, but because they have developed what the Cornell researchers call the capacity to sustain purposeful pursuits.
Variability as Signal, Not Noise
Burrow is careful to frame purposive variability not as a pathology but as information. “It’s an opportunity to pay more attention to the fullness of our experiences,” he has said. The fluctuations in purpose are not problems to be suppressed; they are signals pointing toward something worth investigating — particular environments, relationships, tasks, or systemic pressures that either support or deplete the sense of purposeful engagement.
This is a fundamentally diagnostic stance, and it is one that translates directly into organisational consulting. Rather than treating a team’s or an organisation’s apparent loss of purpose as a communications problem — solvable by a better strategy narrative or a more polished employer brand — the systems psychodynamic practitioner would be drawn to the underlying dynamics, which could be revealed in such questions as:
• What is the organisation’s relationship to its own stated purpose?
•Where does that purpose feel alive and generative, and where does it feel performed or fraudulent?
• What are the specific moments, relationships, or structural features that reliably sustain or undermine purposive engagement?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are diagnostic ones, with observable correlates in the daily life of groups.
Burrow’s research team found that providing teens with opportunities to shape their own learning was a particularly powerful support for purpose stability. Agency matters. In organisational terms, this aligns with a substantial body of evidence on psychological ownership and intrinsic motivation — but it also resonates with the psychodynamic understanding that genuine work (in Bion’s sense) requires that group members experience themselves as real actors in a shared task, not as instruments of a purpose imposed from above.
Steadiness as Leadership Discipline
What the Cornell research ultimately offers — translated into the register of organisational and leadership psychology — is a reframing of what it means to be a purpose-led organisation or leader. The aspiration is not peak purposefulness: the peak experience, the galvanising offsite, the CEO’s barnstorming address. These have their place. But they are not sufficient, and they may even be counterproductive if they create a cycle of purposive inflation followed by deflation that leaves the system more dysregulated than before.
The aspiration, rather, is steady purposefulness: the kind that persists through ordinary Tuesdays and difficult Thursdays, through disappointing results and unexpected setbacks, through the daily undulations of organisational terrain. Burrow’s formulation is elegantly simple: “Remaining even keel is probably better. When it comes to feeling purposeful, stability might be far more advantageous than bouncing around.”
For leaders, this is both a clinical and a developmental challenge. It requires the capacity for what might be called purposive self-regulation — the ability to stay anchored in one’s own sense of direction without either inflating it defensively or losing it under pressure. It requires the relational discipline of the champion: showing up consistently, holding the space, remaining present to the system’s experience without being captured by it.
In a world where so much conspires toward purposive volatility — where every news cycle, every earnings call, every restructuring announcement can send the organisational compass spinning — the ability to hold a steady orientation may be among the most important capacities a leader can develop. Not the loudest voice in the room about purpose, but the most consistent one. Not the brightest flare, but the steadiest light.
Source: Burrow, A.L. & Ratner, K. (2026). Within-Person Variability in Daily Purpose Moderates the Association Between Trait Purpose and Adolescent Adjustment. Journal of Research on Adolescence.
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