"We set the values"

I’ve been through the values-setting exercise in more companies than I care to remember..
Maybe you have too.

You know the drill, we gather in workshops. We discuss what matters. We look for patterns in the sticky notes. Eventually, we land on a shortlist: the things we say we want to live by.
​
The values.

Before the most recent round of this exercise, I stopped and asked myself:
​What are values actually meant to give us?

They’re supposed to guide decisions.
To align people.
To give us a shared language when trade-offs get tough.
To hold us accountable when the pressure is on.
To connect what we do with why we do it.

That’s the theory.

But when I look back, honestly, I can’t recall a single time a value was brought up in a meeting to help us decide.

Not when deadlines were tight.
Not when two teams had competing priorities.
Not when we disagreed on what mattered most.

The values existed. They were written down.
But they weren’t alive in the moment.

Which makes me wonder:
If we never use them, what harm could they do?

Until next time,
Dermot
​The Messy Middle

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