A formal statement of values

Moving on from the yesterday's Vogans to their traveling companions the Dentrassi, for those who are Rosetta Stone Language not aware these creatures are simply the best cooks in the Galaxy and pick up stray hitchhikers to annoy their Vogon hosts. I've brought them into the equation as a key metaphor for me is the difference between a chef and a recipe book user. A recipe book user follows a formula (industrial consultancy) while a chef understands the principles of taste and can thus create a wonderful meal from whatever you happen to have in your kitchen when s/he arrives. In working with organisational values we need a few chefs not a deployed team of recipe book users garnered off the bench of a large consultancy firm.Yesterday I established a difference between rule and ideation based cultures, the former explicit, the latter tacit. I argued that making values explicit was flawed on practical grounds, but I could equally have argued that it is theoretically flawed. True values are evidenced in our actions, it is not enough to state that something is the case, or even to believe it, it must be enacted: Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only (James 2:24) A formal statement of values may appear Language Learning Software to make a clear statement, but in reality it introduces the wrong sort of ambiguity, and the more platitudinous the statement the worst the problem. If for example you are foolish enough to say We put our customers first, then how will you deal with a member of staff whose pro-customer actions produce a massive loss? If Our staff are our greatest asset then how to you handle the inevitable layoffs when a recession hits? Hermeneutics are your enemy, not your friend and the inevitable consequence of taking an explicit approach.So how do we manage an ideation based culture? Well the first and most critical lesson is that we have to manage in the here and now, not some idealistic future state. That means we have to start with mapping the current culture, discovering the dominant beliefs, the proto-myths and the evolutionary possibilities: which directions are possible, not which goal would we like to achieve. Now there are various ways to do this, and its one of the areas where Cognitive Edge has a solid body of methods and also one where SenseMaker? has a significant role to play. Four of the options include: Mapping emergent archetypal characters as cultural signifiers. I wrote this approach up in some detail here and the method is taught on Cognitive Edge accreditation courses. Basically a series of workshops allow the indirect creation of emergent values and archetypal characters (see the illustration for one example) who collectively provide a cultural representation. This method allows discussions to take place about what the archetypes represent, and how they might be changed, culminating Japanese Learning Software in safe-fail interventions in an attempt to trigger change. Ideally type of intervention would seek to amplify a positive but weak archetype rather than to tackle a negative one directly. Archetypes are powerful in many ways.