Team & Leadership Principle

Universal Harmony Theory
Alex Sass, 2020-2026

One of the frameworks I use to understand people, teams and brands

Before the explanation, a useful context. SSS and Universal Harmony are simply two of many working frameworks I use inside strategy. They are not doctrine and I do not expect anyone to adopt the language. They exist because they repeatedly explain behaviour when projects become confusing.

Whether I am helping a national football team improve digital sponsorship exposure, supporting a runway fashion label, or launching a new AI product, the mechanics are surprisingly similar. Humans form relationships, products carry meaning, brands hold identity and conversations build or damage trust. After thirty years in digital I rely less on rigid models and more on pattern recognition. Part instinct, part accumulated observation, often just what I saw across the last ten projects. The frameworks help me make those instincts teachable.

Universal Harmony is one of them.

Where the idea came from

The theory grew from two strands of my work meeting over time. One was a long interest in cult behaviour, group identity and consumer attachment, why people commit deeply to certain communities, brands or movements and remain indifferent to others. The other was my research into human happiness and behaviour, analysing roughly ninety million datasets using IBM systems and Meta sourced signals. I raised seven figures to pursue that research until platform changes from Meta closed the door on continuing it in the same way, which itself demonstrated how strongly behaviour depends on environment.

I started by modelling individuals and their needs and values. What appeared instead was relational. People were not acting as isolated decision makers. They were reacting to something created between them. I am also a philosophy university dropout, which probably explains why I followed the question rather than filing it away.

The observation was simple but persistent.
When people interact repeatedly they create a shared entity. It is formed from expectation, memory, trust, tension and emotion. It belongs to nobody yet shapes everybody. Over time it can become more powerful than the individuals that formed it.

In the original writing I called these shared creations “energy babies”. Not mystical, just a way of describing the living bond produced by interaction. We tend to think relationships exist only inside people. In practice they exist between them and continue to evolve even when nobody is actively thinking about them.

Inside companies

In a business this shared entity is the real organisation.

Founders, cofounders, investors and teams believe they are making separate decisions. In reality they are feeding and reacting to the same evolving structure. Every meeting strengthens it or weakens it. Every disagreement reshapes it. Every success stabilises it. The company culture people talk about is simply the accumulated behaviour of this entity over time.

Across many companies I kept seeing the same human pattern, even in highly profitable ones. Founders achieving strong ROI while privately exhausted. Teams delivering results but operating under tension. A gradual loss of control and sometimes even a loss of freedom inside the thing they created. The business succeeds financially while the people inside it feel increasingly constrained by it.

Digital work amplifies this effect. Communication never really stops, conversations are written and numbers respond instantly. Small tensions compound quickly because the shared structure keeps memory. A healthy one accelerates execution. An unhealthy one slowly consumes the people feeding it.

Much of my work is helping teams consciously shape the entity they are creating together so it supports rather than drains them. Not morale advice, operating mechanics. When people understand they are shaping something that then shapes them back, behaviour changes. Responsibility becomes clearer, challenge becomes safer and decisions stop looping. Profit improves because the organisation behaves as one system. Just as importantly founders often regain a sense of control and freedom, the business starts returning reward instead of only extracting effort.

Digital is often harsh because nobody manages the thing they are collectively building beyond the product itself.

Between brands and customers

Exactly the same structure exists between a company and its customers.

A brand relationship is not a series of transactions. It is another shared entity formed across website visits, emails, social interaction and product use. Each interaction feeds it or harms it. Over time it develops memory and expectation. Loyalty is simply the stability of that entity. Distrust is its instability.

The large scale behavioural modelling work made this visible. People stayed when the relationship behaved consistently with the identity they believed they had joined. They left when the bond was broken, even if the product quality remained high. The reaction was to the relationship, not the object.

So campaigns are not messages to me. They are moments in a living relationship. The website begins the conversation, email maintains memory, social sustains presence and product confirms trust. When aligned the bond strengthens and commerce becomes a natural continuation of connection. When inconsistent the relationship collapses and the energy disperses into competitors.

This is why meaningful brands can charge more and advertise less. They are maintaining the health of the shared entity rather than constantly rebuilding it.

A pattern humans keep rediscovering

After writing the theory I realised similar ideas appear across history. Religious texts describe unions becoming greater than their parts. Philosophy discusses shared being. Quantum physics talks about entanglement and persistent connection. I am not presenting a spiritual belief and I am not a physicist. I arrived at the idea practically by watching teams, communities and customers behave across real projects.

The overlap is interesting rather than intentional.
It suggests humans have been observing the same pattern for a long time from different angles.

Why I use it

SSS helps define what a company is in society.
Universal Harmony helps protect the relationships that allow it to function.

Together they turn digital work from activity into continuity. The goal is reliable profit and sustainable growth, but also something wider. A business that gives energy back to the people building it and meaning to the people using it, because both are connected to the same shared creation.

And don’t worry, I do not normally sit clients down and lecture them about this unless they ask. It stays in the background as a way for me to guide decisions. For the brave ones who do want to go deeper it makes for memorable training sessions, going right back to why we are working together, to what end and for whose happiness. Profit and community tend to follow, which are good things to end up with.