"The danger of too much alignment"

In my last email, I wondered if values-setting exercises are just harmless team-building.

Here’s one reason I’m not so sure.

Most teams don’t refer to the values day to day.
Think about it—when was the last time you heard a value mentioned in the moment a real decision had to be made?

They don’t come up when negotiating trade-offs, or navigating conflict, or deciding what good looks like in the moment.

But they do come back, during performance reviews.

That’s when managers are asked to assess how well someone lived the values. That’s when individuals are expected to prove they demonstrated them. Even if no one ever named them out loud. Even if the team never discussed what they actually mean.

This is one of the hidden dangers.

When values aren’t used in real-time decisions but still appear in formal processes, they shift from shared guideposts to top-down judgement tools.

And when that happens, values aren’t culture, they’re control.

Ralph Stacey saw this clearly. He described values as conformist social objects, symbols promoted to unify behaviour through declared agreement and reduce complex human behaviour to simplified slogans.

In Stacey’s view, real values aren’t written down. They’re formed in the moment, through the decisions and actions of local interactions. They emerge, not from alignment, but from engagement.

Which leaves a difficult question for anyone in a leadership role:

Do I optimise for alignment, or for diversity of thought?
Do I want people to conform, or to notice what’s not being said?

There’s comfort in shared values.
But there’s creativity in shared difference.

Until next time,
Dermot
​The Messy Middle

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