The Big Thing People Miss When Thinking About Values

When you hear the word 'values' what do you think of? As a word it has many meanings... some more helpful for systemic change than others.

[This article was originally posted on the Common Cause Foundation website]

January will mark five years since I started working at the Common Cause Foundation. A key reason why I wanted to join the organisation was its unique mission - shifting cultures away from competition, inequality and oppression, and towards regeneration, equity and harmony, by celebrating and elevating the intrinsic values that underpin our care for one another and our living planet. Common Cause is the only organisation I know of with the explicit aim of promoting a shift in cultural values to help create the societal conditions necessary for a more just future.

Over the past five years, I have had hundreds of conversations about values; what they are, what social science tells us about how they work, why they’re important when thinking about social and environmental justice and what we need to do together to redress the way in which modern, industrialised societies skew our values away from those that foster equality and compassion. 

I’ve found that the word “values” brings to mind different things for different people and does not have a fixed definition. Indeed, social psychologist Meg J. Rohan wrote back in 2000 that “people - including psychologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists seem to use the word values in Humpty Dumpty fashion: they make it mean just what they choose it to mean”. In 2024, I would speculate that little has changed.

In my conversations to date, I have noticed that people generally gravitate towards one (or more) of three topics when they encounter the idea

of values. These topics are what I am loosely labelling as ‘Values as individual characteristics’, ‘Values as organisational beliefs’ and ‘Values as a communications tool’. To me, each of these understandings of values limits their power and potency when it comes to social and environmental justice, which I’ll go on to unpack at the end of this blog.

Values as individual characteristics

When speaking about values, for some people the first thing that comes to mind is an individual’s ‘good’ qualities or characteristics. If we were to describe someone as having strong values, we’d likely imagine someone who is trustworthy, loyal, compassionate, kind etc, and who behaves in accordance with these traits. ‘Values’ as a term becomes a shorthand for good samaritanism; being a ‘good’ person - whatever we might define that to mean.

In this understanding, to ‘work with values’ becomes about encouraging more of these ‘good’ qualities and behaviours. It’s about celebrating them when we see them demonstrated and carving out space and opportunity for individuals to reflect on their values and how they could live in better alignment with them. Obviously not a bad approach in and of itself, but pretty focused on the individual instead of systemic or structural change. It is based on a notion that to improve the world we all just need to be a bit nicer to one another. It doesn’t get into the weeds of how one value could be interpreted in many different ways by different people - for example, what kindness looks like to one person, might be different to another. 

This interpretation of values reinforces the notion that they are vapid, vague and woolly; not a serious thing to consider when trying to influence deep and enduring change in the real world.

Be nice, but maybe also engage in some root cause analysis…

Values as organisational beliefs

Another way of approaching values is through the field of organisational management. Gaining prominence in the 1970s, the practice of identifying organisational or company values has become widespread. Adorning company websites, staff handbooks and office walls, organisational values are supposed to indicate a set of core beliefs that inform and direct an organisation’s actions. For many, the term “values” will invoke the process of defining values on behalf of a company, and the subsequent work needed to ensure these values translate into policy and practice. Under this interpretation we find work on organisational culture, diversity, equity and inclusion and reducing a company's carbon footprint, but also innovation, productivity and shareholder value.

Similarly to values as individual characteristics, the pursuit of an organisational culture that acts in alignment with a set of core values is in and of itself not a bad thing. However, it is not often the case that these values are agreed upon by an exploration into the values of the people who make up the organisation. Rather it tends to be more aspirational and akin to a branding exercise. What values would we like to be seen to hold? Or what values would we like to think we hold when operating at our best as an organisation?

A brilliant satirical jab at organisational values by Wankernomics

Let me expand on this with an example. Below, you can see five lists of values. Each of these lists depicts the values of a large international organisation - Oxfam International, Exxon-Mobil, Kelloggs, WWF International and Coca-Cola. Can you guess which list of values is from which organisation?

Everyone is very courageous it would seem…

Almost impossible, right? How is it possible that five such different organisations can profess such similar values? How can WWF International and Coca-Cola or Exxon-Mobil all be claiming a similar set of values drive their work, given their immense differences? This goes some way to illustrate the limitations of organisational values. Values in this sense become quite bland, uncontentious and ultimately meaningless. They simply exist as a set of ideals and aren’t necessarily shaping the business model or strategy of the organisation that is claiming to hold them.*

Values as a communication tool

Perhaps the most common talking point that I have witnessed when discussing values, specifically with folk working in social and environmental campaigning, is their association with strategic communications. Values have become understood to be a key ingredient in effective messaging; a means to persuade or motivate someone to think a certain way or to take a certain action. 

A common question to ask is: ‘how can we tap into our audience’s values to better engage them in the issue we’re working on?’ (There is a crucial difference in opinion between whether you should attempt to engage existing values within your audience, or engage shared values as a means of effecting change, but that’s a whole other blog post that I’m not going to go into here; either way, the idea of values has firmly cemented itself in discussion about strategic communications).

This understanding of values has led to numerous audience segmentation models (think Harmony Labs, More in Common etc) and communication frameworks (think the work of Anat Shenker-Osorio, Frameworks etc) with the express intention of crafting communications which have the best chance (as evidenced by research) to engage people in a cause. 

It goes without saying that we do need mass public engagement in order to shift the dial on any given social or environmental challenge and so having a well-stocked toolbox with a range of tools makes perfect sense. Values absolutely have a role to play here, but they are no more a silver bullet than any other message ingredient e.g. hope, metaphor, image, humour etc. We understandably want our messages to activate the most amount of people possible and have the best chance they can at achieving our campaign goal, and yet we give very little attention to the wider values environment into which our messages are going. Inevitably, NGO communications are only one tiny drop in the ocean when it comes to the million and one ways that the dominant culture’s values are sustained.

Why values are more important than we tend to assume

All three of these interpretations of the concept of values are partly true and useful. However, I feel they ignore, or at least don’t fully embrace, the possible transformative power that an understanding of values can unlock when it comes to social and environmental change. 

Values influence the way we collectively make decisions about what is important in the world; they determine what we see as necessary and desirable in the face of social and environmental violence and injustice. For example, whether we continue to prioritise - through our laws, politics, social structures etc - economic profit over the health of the planet is subject to the values we hold as societies. Prioritising different values creates the possibility of understanding and responding to challenges in dramatically different ways.

However, when it comes to working with values, we’re asking the wrong questions. Instead of ‘how can we tap into people’s values to move them on our issue?’ or ‘how can we hit upon the ‘right’ values to create the optimal organisational culture?’, we should be asking ‘how can we co-create and sustain cultures in which different values are foregrounded and championed?’. Our work suddenly becomes less about using values to connect more people to our particular issue area, and more about addressing the underlying, root causes of why we find ourselves facing so many interconnected challenges in the first place.

Terms like ideology, worldview, paradigm and deep narrative are, rightfully, gaining traction in the justice space. Values should be among them. Indeed, they cannot be separated.

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* To put you out of your misery, the answers are: 1 = Coca-Cola, 2 = WWF, 3 = Kelloggs, 4 = Exxon-Mobil, 5 = Oxfam International