Stephen Billing’s Blog

Most organisations have spent time and money identifying their values and putting them on posters. This is a waste of time because it represents a fundamental misunderstanding about what values are.

Most of my client organisations have statements of their values written on posters, shown in prominent positions around the office. Many have created other artefacts for displaying these values, such as stands for the desk, cards, notepads. Clearly these organisations have invested considerable money and time of their human resources and corporate communications departments in coming up with these statements.

Obviously the return on this investment is hard to measure in terms of dollars and cents, and so must be articulated in non-specific terms of "company commitment" and the like.

I think there is absolutely no return on this investment because working out the values and communicating them to people is a misguided activity in the first place.

First, it assumes that the values of a group of people can be prescribed rationally by working them out. Second, it assumes that the values exist in their own right, independent of context. It is as though these value statements have some intrinsic meaning of their own. Third, it assumes that if people follow these values the organisation will be improved.

Do you think these assumptions are valid? Can a set of values be thought out rationally and then prescribed for others? Do these values as written down have meaning of their own independently of context? Will everyone having the same values make a better organisation? 

I will be posting daily on this topic for the next three days…