Mission, Vision and Values as Shared Context for Agents
The only difference is you don’t need to keep reminding your agents about them!
My agents read the company values every morning. Not because I’m sentimental. Because it works.
Every agent session in my org starts by loading shared context: who Peter is, where Gather is headed, what we care about, how we behave. It’s the alignment layer. Without it, agents optimize for their immediate task. With it, they optimize for the organization.
You already have this for humans. Netflix has the culture deck. Amazon has the leadership principles. Stripe has the operating principles. These are system prompts. They scale judgment without scaling oversight. They tell every actor in the organization “here’s how we make decisions when nobody’s watching.”
The difference in an agentic org is that shared context isn’t optional. It’s not a slide deck that people read once during onboarding and forget. It’s a file that gets loaded into every session, every time. The agent actually reads it. Every time.
When my agents drift - Morgan doing research instead of GTM, Elise offering health advice instead of citing evidence - the fix is always the same: tighten the shared context. Clarify the scope. Restate the values. It’s the same fix you’d use for a human team that’s lost alignment. You wouldn’t add more rules. You’d go back to basics: what are we here to do?
My CLAUDE.md functions as the company handbook. My brain/vision.md is the strategy doc. They’re the same artifacts you already have, serving the same function they’ve always served. The only difference is that your agents will actually read them.
Are there other alignment artifacts designed for corporations that you’re co-opting to better align your agentic team?