This week I was asked to attend a “values refresher workshop” at work. The purpose of this half-day training was to review and discuss the corporate values of the organisation.

It is easy to be cynical about these kind of exercises. But I found myself being surprisingly positive about it.

This is partly because the process that the organisation did to develop the values was a genuinely consultative and thoughtful exercise. It was a solid piece work that came up with a set of values that actually resonate with the organisation. Unlike the bland obviousness of many values statements, these actually have some careful thinking behind them.

Where I do have criticisms of this kind of thing, however good they are in themselves, is that they tend to put the focus too much on individual personal behaviour. Which is of course important, but the values of an organisation are also expressed through the nature of its structures and processes. For an organisation to be able to live its values fully these structural elements need to be considered and designed so as to align with them. They provide the framework in which people have to operate. If they are not aligned they can inhibit people from acting on the values or incentivise behaviour that is counter to the values. Particualrly if there is patchy buy-in from various levels of management.

I find that the way my organisation actually asks me to work is at times often at odds with the stated values.

However the reason that I am talking about this is that as part of the workshop our small team was asked to do one of those team building crafting exercises. We were ask to build a artefact that expressed the values. We ended up building something based on the idea of a decision dice (this was my idea) with each of the values on a different face. We sort of overlooked the fact that there are only five values.

I was quite proud of what we produced and wanted to show off some photos. (One of the team wanted to add something we could hang the dice up from – which I thought rather defeated the point – but teamwork…)