<aside> ⚠️ You cannot change personal values! Any attempt to prescribe organisational values is hence futile. The more aspirational the less successful. Aspirational corporate values end up adorning walls and coffee mugs, highlighting the pain points of the organisation in plain sight, an expensive advertisement of deficits.

</aside>

The hard truth about values lies in observable consistent behaviours.

But rejoice – we don’t have to throw out the baby with the bath water: Value discovery (sic!) does work for charting common ground in closely knit teams. Just not beyond that scope. And only so in teams with extremely high psychological safety.

It does so by translating values into concrete behaviours:

<aside> ☝️ Given these restraints about value discovery it’s often more feasible to start with the behaviours right away.

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And then the hard work starts:

You have to shape the environment so that it makes the desired behaviours easy and the undesirable ones hard.

Some powerful levers:

• Incentives/penalties
• Organisational structure(!)
• Governance
• Processes
• Rituals
• Tools

As a manager your core job is to design a system that makes it inevitable to do the right things well. ↔ When intentions fail look first for friction in the system. It’s rarely individuals (except narcissists and psychopaths – i. e. assholes) who fail:

A bad system will beat a good person every time.

– Deming

This is also true the other way round!