Earlier this week, I wrote about how difficult it has become for young people to build a life in many of our cities.

The thought started with my daughter and her boyfriend looking for an apartment in New York City. Together they earn a good income. They work hard. One works for a nonprofit doing work that matters to the city and its communities.

And yet finding a place they could afford was remarkably difficult.

It got me thinking about something much bigger than housing.

We talk a lot about what we value.

We value teachers. Nurses. Social workers. Caregivers. Artists. People who work for nonprofits and community organizations. People doing the everyday work that keeps communities functioning and makes them places we actually want to live.

But valuing something and rewarding it aren't necessarily the same thing.

That's an uncomfortable disconnect.

It's also not unique to society.

I've seen versions of it inside organizations throughout my career.

An organization says collaboration is important but structures incentives almost entirely around individual performance.

Leaders encourage people to take thoughtful risks, but the person whose risk doesn't work out pays a much higher price than the person who never took one.

A company talks about long-term strategy while almost every important conversation is driven by the next quarter.

None of this usually happens because someone deliberately decided those were the organization's values.

Systems develop over time. Compensation structures, budgets, performance measures, promotion criteria and everyday management decisions begin reinforcing certain behaviors.

And people notice.

They don't need a values statement to tell them what matters. They watch who gets promoted and see what gets funded. They notice which projects survive when budgets tighten and which ones disappear. They learn which mistakes are tolerated and which ones aren't.

Before long, an organization has communicated its priorities far more clearly through its choices than it ever could through words on a wall.

I think the same thing happens at a much larger scale.

Our economy is also a system of signals and incentives. What we pay for, invest in, celebrate and give our attention to sends messages about what is valuable.

Sometimes those signals line up with the things we say matter.

Sometimes they don't.

I'm not suggesting every teacher should earn what an entertainer earns or that every organization should reward every behavior equally. Real economies and real organizations are much more complicated than that.

But I do think the gaps are worth noticing.

We call something essential but make it increasingly difficult for the people doing it to build a life. An organization encourages one behavior while quietly rewarding another. We say something matters but don't put resources behind it.

Eventually, systems produce more of what they reward.

And that may be the most useful part of this for me.

When we don't like what a system is producing, maybe one of the first places to look is at what we're asking it to reward.

Not what we intended.

What our decisions actually encourage.

Where does the money go? What gets attention? What gets protected when choices become difficult? What behavior gets someone promoted?

Those answers tell us quite a bit about what an organization values.

They may tell us something about our communities and our economy too.

Because the choices we make over and over again don't just reflect the system.