Stephen Billing’s Blog

Values are constantly being negotiated in specific situations. They do not exist on their own, outside of human action.

An earlier post said that writing values on a poster assumes that these values have some meaning in their own right, independent of context or situation.

While values have enduring qualities, they must continually be negotiated afresh in specific situations. A value only has meaning when it is applied in a specific situation. And then it has meaning again when it is applied in another situation.

Further, values are often in conflict with each other.

For example, nurses in hospitals are continually negotiating the value of seeing a patient within a specific time frame, and other values such as seeing those with the most urgent need first.

Writing values on posters makes no sense to me. It would be more useful to discuss situations in which these conflicting values arise. For example, in a mental health facility, does keeping the house clean take priority over taking a lonely or depressed resident for an outing?

Joas – The Genesis of Values

Stacey and Griffin – Complexity and the Experience of Leading Organizations