Designing Fairer Organisations: What We Learn When We Forget Who We Are

Imagine if every board meeting began with:

“Before we start, please forget whether you’re the CEO, the intern, the shareholder, or the warehouse worker.”

It sounds absurd, but it’s the closest real-world equivalent to a thought experiment that political philosopher John Rawls proposed in the 1970s—a tool that has quietly shaped modern debates about justice, rights, and fairness.

It also happens to be one of the most useful ways I’ve found to think about power and responsibility inside organisations, especially after studying conflict transformation and then corporate governance. What happens when we’re asked to design systems without assuming we’ll land at the top of them?

This post builds from Rawls’ idea—not to give a philosophy lecture, but to explore how this shift in perspective might help us build workplaces and institutions that treat people more humanely.

A small dose of Rawls

Rawls was trying to answer a deceptively simple question:

How do we create rules for a society that are fair to everyone?

The challenge, he argued, is that we tend to defend whatever benefits us. We all do this.

Wealth, background, status, education—these things shape our sense of what is “reasonable.” So Rawls suggested a way to think about fairness before bias gets a chance to speak.

The veil of ignorance

Picture a group of people designing the rules of their society. Before they begin, they step behind what Rawls calls the veil of ignorance. Behind the veil, you don’t know:

• your job or salary

• your race, gender, class, or background

• your abilities or health

• whether you’re part of the majority or the margins

Only once the system is designed does the veil lift—and you discover where you’ve ended up.

Rawls believed this would push people to choose rules that:

• protect basic rights,

• offer real opportunities for everyone, and

• ensure that inequalities only exist if they benefit those who are worst off.

You don’t need to agree with all of Rawls to see why this is useful: it forces us to imagine fairness from more than one vantage point.

Why this matters beyond political theory

In conflict transformation, the focus isn’t just on reducing tension—it’s on asking why the tension exists at all. What structures, expectations, or inequalities keep producing harm?

The veil of ignorance plays into this directly. It asks:

• What if I were the person most affected by this decision?

• Would this rule still feel fair if I weren’t in the room where it was made?

• What would justice look like if I had no guarantees about my position?

This shift is simple, but it’s powerful. It helps us move conversations about fairness out of abstraction and into practice.

Tensions and the reality check

Like any theory, this idea comes with complications—ones that become more pronounced when we apply them to organisations and institutions.

1. The gamble of upward mobility

Even if we momentarily forget who we are, many of us still gamble on the possibility of becoming one of the “winners.” You see this in political voting patterns and corporate cultures alike—the quiet hope that if we work hard, we’ll eventually reach the levels where inequality works in our favour.

But the veil asks us to sit with a different possibility: what if we never make it up the ladder at all?

2. Trade-offs disguised as fairness

Utilitarian reasoning often shows up in organisations as “practical efficiency” or “necessary trade-offs.”

You can hear it in decisions framed like:

• “If we tighten targets this quarter, we’ll hit the numbers we need.”

• “If this team absorbs a bit more workload, we can avoid hiring costs.”

• “If junior staff stay flexible on hours, we can deliver faster for clients.”

• “If we streamline this department, we can boost overall performance.”

These are familiar, everyday versions of the same logic: a small harm to a few is justified by a larger benefit to many.

Rawls’ approach—and Wolff’s summary of it—pushes directly against this:

“Economic inequalities within a society are justified only if they are to the advantage of the worst off.”— Wolff (2001: 1)

The veil of ignorance forces us to ask the uncomfortable version of the question:

Would this “small harm” still seem reasonable if I turned out to be the one absorbing it?

3. The neutrality problem: when “treating everyone the same” obscures inequality

Rawls’ veil deliberately strips away identity. But contemporary social justice movements have revealed how harmful “neutrality” can be. People do not start from the same place, and pretending they do often reinforces existing disadvantages.

This is where Rawls needs supplementing. The veil helps us imagine fairness, but:

Fair systems require actual participation from those most affected, not hypothetical empathy on their behalf.

A rule can look fair “on paper” and still fail the people it claims to protect.

4. “Open to all” is not enough

Rawls argues that inequalities must attach to offices “open to all.” But organisational life shows us that formal openness doesn’t guarantee genuine access. Cultural norms, informal networks, structural biases—these all influence who actually ends up in leadership.

So we need more than the veil. We need the voices of those who know what the margins feel like.

Bringing the veil into the boardroom

So what does any of this mean for organisations?

The veil becomes a simple but demanding ethical test:

Would I support this decision if I might be the person with the least power in the room?

Apply that to some familiar arenas:

Pay and compensation

Would I design the pay gap this way if there were an equal chance I’d be on the lowest wage?

Working conditions

Would I approve these shift patterns, productivity targets, or contracts if I didn’t know whether I’d be the one living them?

Promotion pathways

Would I trust our so-called “meritocracy” if I weren’t already playing from a position of advantage?

Supply chains

Would I still sign off on this supplier if I might be the worker at the other end of it?

These are not abstract questions. They shape how organisations distribute risk, dignity, and opportunity.

Why start here?

Because this perspective forces a different kind of honesty.

It replaces:

• “What works for us?” with

• “What protects all of us, especially the people with the least protection?”

Rawls doesn’t give us a blueprint. What he gives us is a discipline:

To design systems as if we didn’t know whether we’d be the ones hurt by them.

In a world where so many decisions are justified in the name of efficiency, growth, or “standard practice,” the veil of ignorance pulls us back to something more human.

Whether we’re talking about governments, communities, or workplaces, the question remains the same:

Would I still agree to this if I could end up anywhere in the system?

If the answer is yes, we’re moving closer to fairness.

If not, we have work to do.

Author’s Note

This piece brings together work I developed across two programmes of study — my research on justice and political theory, and my work in conflict transformation and corporate responsibility. Exploring the veil of ignorance through the lens of organisational life became an unexpected bridge between the two. It is written in the hope that theoretical tools can help illuminate the structures we build and the choices we make within them.