Per Ardua ad Astra: The Motto That Became a Framework

How thirty years of navigating other people’s skies led to building my own constellation.

There is a phrase stamped into the consciousness of every Royal Air Force officer. It appears on crests, above doorways, on the inside covers of logbooks you are not supposed to lose. Per ardua ad astra. Through adversity, to the stars. You hear it so often it stops being a motto and starts being wallpaper. Background noise. Something you nod at without ever really thinking about what it means.

I spent twenty years inside the RAF without properly thinking about it. I was too busy doing the thing it described to notice that it was describing me.

Then I left, and the phrase followed me out.

Part I: Security

Before you can navigate anywhere, you have to learn the rules of the sky.

I joined the Royal Air Force because I wanted to fly, which is the least interesting reason anyone joins the Royal Air Force and also the most honest one. What I discovered once I was inside the system was that flying is not really about flying. It is about making decisions under conditions where the cost of getting it wrong is measured in lives, including your own. The aircraft is the vehicle. The human is the variable.

I served as a Tornado F3 Navigator, which is a peculiar role that does not exist in the way most people understand it. A Navigator in a fast jet is not a passive map-reader. I was the weapons systems officer, responsible for threat assessment, tactical decision-making, and managing the aircraft’s combat systems while the pilot flew. The cockpit divided the world into two jobs: one person kept us in the air, the other person decided what we did while we were there. Both jobs had to work. Neither job could afford to be wrong.

The training was long, expensive, and deliberately brutal. Not because the RAF enjoys breaking people, but because the environment you are being trained to operate in does not care about your feelings. At forty thousand feet, at closing speeds measured in hundreds of knots, with a threat environment that changes every three seconds, there is no room for intuition that has not been stress-tested against reality. You learn the procedures. You learn the systems. You learn the doctrine. You learn when to follow the checklist and when the checklist is trying to kill you.

This is what Self-Determination Theory calls the need for security. Not safety in the comfortable sense, but the psychological need to feel that the system you are operating within has structure, that the rules exist for a reason, and that your competence within that structure is real. The RAF gave me that. It gave me the discipline to understand a system before I tried to change it. It gave me the ability to operate under pressure without mistaking adrenaline for clarity. It gave me, in the language I would later build, the Realist foundation: the understanding that some constraints are not obstacles but architecture.

I accumulated instructor qualifications — attack instruction, tactics, electronic warfare, combat survival. These are not polite certificates. They are a map of someone who spent years understanding how humans behave when the stakes are highest. I flew the Tornado F3 display at airshows across the UK, Europe, North America, Chile, and the Falkland Islands. I navigated the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight’s Lancaster and Dakota. In 2006, when the pilot of a Dominie trainer became incapacitated, I landed the aircraft and received the Royal Air Force Green Endorsement for exceptional airmanship.

I tell you this not because it is impressive, but because it is relevant. Every one of those experiences was a data point I did not know I was collecting. I was learning how people make decisions under threat. I was learning how systems break. I was learning that the most dangerous moment is not when everything is going wrong, but when everything feels routine and you stop paying attention.

Per ardua. The adversity was not the enemy. It was the curriculum.

Part II: Autonomy

The hardest thing about leaving the military is not the loss of identity. It is the loss of certainty.

In the RAF, you know who you are. You know what tomorrow looks like. You know the chain of command, the mission parameters, the rules of engagement. You know that the person sitting behind you in the briefing room has been through the same selection process, the same training, the same institutional baptism. The system is the identity. When you leave, you take the identity with you, but the system stays behind, and you spend an uncomfortable amount of time standing in civilian rooms wondering why nobody seems to know what they are doing.

I left the RAF and walked into marketing, which is the kind of sentence that makes military people wince and marketing people nervous. The assumption, on both sides, is that the skills do not transfer. That the discipline of tactical decision-making at Mach 0.9 has nothing to say about brand strategy or consumer segmentation. That the person who managed weapons systems in a combat environment will find the politics of a boardroom either baffling or beneath them.

The assumption is wrong, but not for the obvious reason. The skills do not transfer because they are similar. They transfer because they are the same. Decision-making under uncertainty is decision-making under uncertainty. The question is not whether you can apply military thinking to marketing. The question is whether you can recognise that the underlying psychology is identical, and then build something new from that recognition.

This is what Self-Determination Theory calls the need for autonomy. Not independence in the rebellious sense, but the psychological need to feel that your actions are self-directed, that you are the author of your own choices, that the direction you are moving in is one you chose rather than one that was assigned. The RAF gave me structure. Leaving the RAF gave me the compulsion to build my own.

In the language I would later develop, this was the Adventurer awakening. Regulatory Focus Theory describes two fundamental orientations: promotion focus, which drives us toward possibility and reward, and prevention focus, which drives us toward safety and the avoidance of loss. Every career transition is a regulatory focus test. Stay where you are, and the prevention focus wins: the known quantity, the pension, the identity that fits like a worn-in flight suit. Leave, and the promotion focus wins: the unknown territory, the possibility of building something that did not exist before, the willingness to trade certainty for agency.

I chose agency. Not because I was brave, but because I was bored. The Inventive Pathfinder does not leave systems because they are failing. They leave systems because they have been fully mapped, and the interesting work is now elsewhere.

Part III: Competence

The CMO role is, at its core, a navigational problem.

You have a destination. You have instruments. You have a crew. You have weather that changes without warning and fuel that does not last forever. The difference between a good CMO and a bad one is the same as the difference between a good navigator and a bad one: the ability to read the instruments and the environment, to know when the data is telling you something real and when it is telling you something that was real twenty minutes ago.

I became CMO across three residential brands: Homes for Students, Orla, and VervLife. Together, they cover over 60,000 beds across 56 UK cities, spanning purpose-built student accommodation and build-to-rent, generating revenue north of £650 million. The marketing function I lead must navigate the meaningful differences between these audiences while maintaining coherent brand thinking across the group. It is a segmentation problem, a positioning problem, a channel problem, and a behavioural problem, all operating simultaneously, all changing at different speeds.

This is where the Thinker emerged. Not as a personality type, but as a mode of operation. Self-Determination Theory identifies competence as one of the four fundamental human needs: the need to feel effective, to master challenges, to see the evidence that your actions produce results. The CMO role is built for competence-seeking. Every campaign is a hypothesis. Every data set is an instrument reading. Every A/B test is a controlled experiment. The dashboards are the cockpit. The metrics are the altimeter.

But competence alone is not enough. The danger of the Thinker mode is that it mistakes measurement for understanding. You can optimise a campaign to death. You can read the data so closely that you lose sight of the story it is telling. I have seen marketing teams drown in attribution models and multi-touch funnels, and I have seen them miss the obvious: that behind every click is a person making a decision, and that decision is driven by psychology, not technology.

This is the insight that changed everything. Not because it was new, but because I had seen it before, in a different cockpit, at a different altitude, under very different circumstances. The human is always the variable. The technology is always the vehicle. If you do not understand the psychology, the instruments are just numbers.

Part IV: Relatedness

The framework started with a question I could not answer.

Why do people do what they do?

Not in the abstract, philosophical sense. In the practical, operational, “I need to write a marketing strategy by Friday” sense. Why does one student choose accommodation based on the social scene and another based on the security of the building? Why does one young professional care about the brand’s values and another care about the proximity to the gym? Why do two people with identical demographics make opposite decisions?

I looked at the frameworks available. DISC gave me four behavioural types but no motivational theory to explain them. MBTI gave me sixteen types and a community of practitioners who could not agree on what any of them meant. Insights Discovery gave me colours that were pleasant to look at and difficult to act on. None of them connected behaviour to motivation in a way that was both theoretically grounded and practically useful.

So I built one.

STAR synthesises seven psychological theories. Self-Determination Theory provides the four fundamental needs: relatedness, competence, autonomy, and security. The Big Five provides the personality dimensions that shape how those needs express themselves. Dual Process Theory explains the interplay between fast intuition and slow analysis. Regulatory Focus Theory maps the promotion/prevention orientations that drive decision-making. Social Identity Theory accounts for the tribal and group dynamics that influence choice. Cognitive Bias Theory reveals the systematic errors in human judgment. And Appraisal Theory of Emotion explains how we interpret events and why the same situation produces different emotional responses in different people.

From this foundation, STAR identifies four core human types. The Socialiser, driven by relatedness. The Thinker, driven by competence. The Adventurer, driven by autonomy. The Realist, driven by security. Each type branches into three archetypes, giving twelve distinct profiles, each with its own motivational signature, communication preferences, and decision-making tendencies.

The framework works because it is not a personality test. It is a motivational map. It does not tell you who someone is. It tells you why they do what they do, and therefore how to communicate with them in a way that lands.

This is what Self-Determination Theory calls the need for relatedness. Not socialising in the superficial sense, but the deep human need to understand and be understood, to connect with others through shared meaning, to build something that helps people see each other more clearly. STAR is, at its core, an act of relatedness. It exists because I wanted to understand people, and it persists because other people found that understanding useful.

The books followed naturally. The STAR Framework: Rewriting the Rules of Consumer Engagement won the NYC Big Book Award in 2025. The STAR Operating System translated the theory into practice. Dear Algorithm, It’s Not Me, It’s You examined the relationship between human behaviour and algorithmic systems. The Substack, The Unoptimised Human, became the running commentary, the space where ideas are tested and connections drawn across domains that most people would consider unrelated.

The speaking, the advisory boards, the consulting, the community — these are all expressions of the same need. The Socialiser does not build frameworks for the sake of frameworks. They build frameworks because understanding is the precondition for connection, and connection is the precondition for change.

The Punchline

I did not see it at the time. Not during the twenty years of flying. Not during the transition into marketing. Not even during the early years of building STAR, when the framework was still a collection of ideas that did not yet have a name.

But it was always there.

Per ardua ad astra. Through adversity, to the stars.

The adversity was real. The years of training. The discipline. The constraints. The systems I operated inside and eventually left behind. The uncertainty of the leap into a civilian career. The loneliness of being the person in the room who thinks differently. The frustration of watching organisations fail to understand the people they serve. The long, unglamorous work of building a framework from first principles because the existing ones were not good enough.

The stars were real too. Not as a destination, but as a direction. The RAF gave me the vocabulary of navigation: heading, bearing, track, drift. STAR gave me the vocabulary of human behaviour: types, archetypes, motivations, patterns. Both are navigational systems. Both exist because the territory is vast and the human mind needs a map.

I spent twenty years navigating other people’s aircraft. Then I spent fifteen years navigating other people’s brands. Somewhere in the middle, I realised I was really navigating one question: why do people do what they do?

STAR is the answer I built because nobody else had one that worked.

The RAF motto told me who I was before I had the language for it. Per ardua ad astra. Through adversity, to the stars. I just spent thirty years building the map.

David Chadderton spent his twenties and thirties teaching people how to make life-or-death decisions at forty thousand feet. He now applies the same principles to consumer psychology, which, depending on the brief, can feel equally high-stakes. He’s the creator of the STAR Framework and the author of The STAR Framework: Rewriting the Rules of Consumer Engagement (NYC Big Book Award 2025), The STAR Operating System: Decode Mindset, Understand Motivation, Transform Human Behaviour, and Dear Algorithm, It’s Not Me, It’s You. By day, a Chief Marketing Officer. By night, a behavioural science obsessive who writes The Unoptimised Human because he can’t stop thinking about why people do what they do.