Let's chatForge put its values, code of conduct, and a personal note from our founder in one public place. Written by the team, behavioral rather than aspirational, and shared this June for Men's Mental Health Awareness Month, because psychological safety is the whole company, not a formality.
We put everything we hold ourselves to in one place, and made it public. Our values, our code of conduct, and a note from our founder on why any of it matters now live together at forge.is/committed-to.
None of this is new in spirit. We have operated by most of it for years. What changed is that we wrote it down plainly, in language anyone working with us can read and hold us to, rather than leaving it implied.
The timing is not incidental. June is Men's Mental Health Awareness Month. A lot of what follows, especially the part about psychological safety, comes from our founder's own experience, and putting it out now is a small way of saying the quiet thing out loud.
Values that live in people's heads drift. Not on purpose, but slowly, especially under pressure. We have watched it happen to ourselves: a hard stretch where everyone is carrying too much, and the way we treat each other quietly slips before anyone names it. The point of writing this down is not to sound principled. It is to give us something concrete to check ourselves against when the drift starts, and to give the people we work with a standard they can point to when we fall short.
A value is only useful if you can tell whether you are living it. So ours are behavioral, and each one carries a test.
Our values were written by the team, not handed down. Each comes with a "we know this is true when" that turns a nice idea into something you can actually observe. We are not "collaborative" because we say so. We know we are working as one team when we are in the same design file from the start, sharing work early, and stepping in to support each other without being asked.
Two we hold closely. The first is grounded openness: staying rooted in real experience and conviction while remaining genuinely open to being wrong, and treating being wrong early as better than confidently wrong late. The best work we have ever done came out of rooms safe enough for someone to say "I think we are solving the wrong problem" out loud. The second is honoring how each other is wired. Different brains produce different kinds of brilliance, and communication style is not a proxy for capability or commitment.
The code of conduct is the part that governs how we actually work with clients, collaborators, and each other. It covers the things that matter most to the people who hire us: confidentiality and how we handle your work, intellectual property that passes through to you rather than getting locked up with us, fair dealing, inclusion and the standard we hold clients to as well as ourselves, responsible and transparent use of AI, a safe and genuinely remote-first way of working, and a clear path to raise a concern without fear of retaliation.
The public version carries the commitments anyone working with us should be able to see. A more detailed internal version covers the operational and legal specifics our team formally agrees to. Both say the same thing in different depth.
The page also carries a personal note from Scott on why this is the whole company and not a formality. It is honest about building a place where the way your brain works is not a liability to manage.
Naming the hard thing first is only the start of a leader's job. You also have to build the conditions for it: make it safe to ask the obvious question or admit you are lost, model being wrong out loud, protect the people who speak up rather than punish them, and follow through when someone raises a concern. A leader sets the ceiling on how honest everyone else is willing to be, and psychological safety is not something you announce once. It is something you maintain on purpose, especially when it is inconvenient. If the person at the top will not do that work, no one below them will either, and you end up performing safety instead of practicing it.
Men in particular are taught to carry that kind of thing silently. Naming it as a founder, in public, during the month set aside for exactly this, is the point.
We have not always gotten this right. We have made mistakes, our people have, our clients have, and some of it was outside anyone's control. When it happened, we owned it, learned from it, and changed how we work so it would not repeat. This is not a finished document. We revise it as we learn, because the alternative is letting it drift again.
Writing it down is how we let you hold us to it. And if you are a man carrying something heavy right now, this month is as good a reason as any to tell someone.
forge.is/committed-to
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