Mission in Motion
Am I busy, or am I making progress?
That was the question I put to my team recently, and it’s one I’ve been asking myself for years. It cuts to the heart of how I try to lead — not just what we do, but how we do it.
Let’s call it Mission in Motion.
Mission: the compass
Mission is the compass. It’s the “why” behind the work. Without it, we’re just moving for the sake of it.
For me, this goes back further than Powerverse. I still remember the 1992 Rio Earth Summit as a teenager. That was the first time I realised climate and consumption weren’t abstract policy issues — they were existential. A decade later, in 2004, I wrote what I called the “Virgin Energy” letter which I talk about elsewhere in my blog, imagining a new way forward in energy. Through my CloudSense years I learned the craft of scaling software. And when Powerverse began in 2022, it felt less like a choice and more like convergence: timing, need, and readiness.
That journey shaped my personal mission:
I want my leadership skills and experiences to drive system-level change, creating both societal and shareholder value.
Everyone needs a why. Simon Sinek calls it the Golden Circle. Richard Hoyle, on my podcast, put it another way: naming the purpose precisely lifts the work itself. Without that clarity, we drift. With it, we sharpen.
For us at Powerverse, the why is simple:
Why: reduce the burden of dirty, unaffordable energy on households and society.
How: orchestrate home energy with Raya, partner with retailers and carmakers, and make it simple.
What: the products and services our customers see.
Mission without motion, though, is just wishful thinking.
Motion: the engine
Motion is the engine. It’s how we move, the way we translate mission into reality.
Many of my thoughts on this part of the story were played back to me recently by Ray Dalio. In one of his talks, I was listening to, he draws a simple but piercing distinction: activity versus progress. He describs the trap of mistaking motion for movement — chasing meetings, emails, lists — and feeling satisfied, but not actually moving forward.
That hit home and led to the question I posed to my team.
I thought back to my old “clear inbox” policy. The dopamine of an empty inbox felt like control, but what did it really achieve? Countless hours spent on busyness that had little to do with outcomes.
The catalyst for me had been my been my business coach. But then came the personal reflection. Is this way of showing up reflected well actross our teams? It is so easy to become stretched thin, scattered, overwhelmed. People working harder, but feeling less effective.
So the question is: how do we design motion so it produces results, not busyness?
From activity to achievement
For me the answer comes closer using a few simple principles:
Urgent vs Important. Drawing the 2×2 grid. Most of us spend too long in urgent but unimportant. The real work is in important but not yet urgent that gets forgotten. This work can be uncomfortable, because it is ambiguous and relies much more on curiosity and creativity.
Outcomes vs Outputs. Ticking tasks isn’t progress. Delivering the outcome that matters is. If I frame my work there is usually a simpler route to a better result.
Purpose → Process → Outcome. Any meeting without those three anchors isn’t worth running and is a drain on time.
And as I think about how many plates I spin:
No more than three live projects. Every project carries overhead. More than three, and you can lose half your week to coordination and achieve less. Less really is more.
These survival strategies for doing meaningful work without burning out have helped me out for years. They set a mutual expectation between colleagues too: if I commit to only three projects, I commit to doing them well. If I choose outcomes over outputs, I commit to fruit over noise.
Creating a fruitful workplace
A few years ago, I wrote a piece called Building a More Fruitful Place to Work. It came from reflecting on lessons I wish I’d learned earlier. At CloudSense, we built capital-efficient teams — but we also pushed them too hard. The overstretch took a toll on creativity and sustainability.
In that piece, I argued for a different kind of workplace:
Do less, achieve more. Protect headspace.
Projects are pulled, not pushed. Agency fuels ownership.
Focus time is sacred. Creative energy is the scarcest resource we have.
Cyclical rhythms matter. Humans aren’t machines; we need pace, rest, and recharge.
Creativity is the multiplier. Set the everyday conditions — like water and sunlight for a plant — and fruit will come.
Those ideas aren’t just “nice to have.” They’re how we make our mission real. If people are overloaded, they won’t deliver. If they’re nurtured, they’ll surprise us with quality we didn’t even plan for.
Mission + Motion = Momentum
This is why I frame it as Mission in Motion. They aren’t separate. They feed each other.
Mission inspires us.
Motion channels us.
The results reinforce the mission.
That’s the flywheel. When it spins, progress compounds.
At Powerverse, that means focusing our motion on the few things that matter — like getting ready for VLP trading, scaling connected devices, and proving the carbon and cost impact of our platform. One EV charger connected to Raya can reduce lifetime CO₂ emissions by around 40% compared to the baseline. Multiply that by 100,000 and the impact is staggering. That’s not just motion — that’s momentum.
A question for each day
So I close with the same question I asked my team:
What is my single most important outcome today?
Not the most urgent email. Not the biggest list. The one outcome that, if achieved, makes everything else easier or less necessary.
If each of us can answer that, then mission and motion align. And when they align, we do more than stay busy — we build something fruitful.