Embrace the tensions in your company values
A recent tweet by @harjeet forced me to consider some of the points I’d made about company values in my recent blog post. In particular, how tension emphasises the intended meaning.
I broadly agree with the sentiment here. I don’t believe that trade-offs need to be included in all values, but they can be extremely powerful when they are.
Incorporating and celebrating trade-offs comes down to a number of factors. Firstly, recognising the spectrum that your values exist on; and secondly, recognising where there might be more subtle conflicts between your values.
Tensions are the interesting part of a culture
The idea that tensions within a culture are incredibly important was driven home to me as I was reading Sapiens recently. For example, at the heart of most Western cultures is a trade-off between equality and freedom.
The point is not that either freedom or equality are fully good or bad. Most people think that both of these things have some sort of benefit. The question is one of precedence. Given a scenario where these compete, how should we act?
This isn’t limited to political questions though, it affects behaviour on all sorts of levels. The author ends one of the chapters by essentially saying that the interesting parts of a culture exist in this space of cognitive dissonance:
If tensions, conflicts and irresolvable dilemmas are the spice of every culture, a human being who belongs to any particular culture must hold contradictory beliefs and be riven by incompatible values. It’s such an essential feature of any culture that it even has a name: cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values, it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture.
If, say, a Christian really wants to understand the Muslims who attend that
mosque down the street, he shouldn’t look for a pristine set of values that every Muslim holds dear. Rather, he should enquire into the catch-22s of Muslim culture, those places where rules are at war and standards scuffle. It’s at the very spot where the Muslims teeter between two imperatives that you’ll understand them best.
Recognising this in society at large is interesting. I also felt it was a concept worth exploring within a company.
There are always multiple ways to act in a given situation. Choosing the right approach is harder if you don’t know the precedence of the options. You can’t spell all of these situations out, but you can try to give people clues about how they prioritise these modes.
Things are rarely black and white. If you make it seem like your values are, it will be confusing. Tensions within values come in two forms:
- Opposing ends of a spectrum
- Indirect conflicts
Placing values on a spectrum
It is seldom the case that you want people to always act in a certain way. Where both ends of a spectrum have some value, you can use it to display a preference. For example, the following could be explored:
- aggressive — nurturing
- collaborative — individualistic
- structured — chaotic
- frugal — lavish
Show people where on the spectrum they will end up making decisions most of the time. Some of my favourite expressions of values are composed of couplets. These hint at how they should be applied:
- Strong opinions, weakly held
- Dream big, start small (one of ours)
- Be transparent, but don’t meddle (not one of our core values, but another place I’ve highlighted tension)
By acknowledging the tension between the values, or describing how one takes precedence, you can make it easier for people to use them in their work.
Indirect conflicts
Sometimes values clash even if they are not on opposite ends of the same spectrum. A useful example pointed out in the original twitter thread was the trade-off between autonomy and collaboration.
If you interpret autonomy to only mean the autonomy of a given individual, then collaboration will certainly impose upon it. However, it’s less of a problem if you accept that within larger companies, individuals can rarely operate on their own agenda.
This provides an opportunity to highlight the fact that autonomy occurs at the team level, rather than having a group of fully autonomous individuals. In order to be part of autonomous teams, people need to try even harder to work well together. The collaborative rules of play need to be emphasised more heavily.
Using anti-values as negative space
As well as making explicit the tensions between your own values, there is another trade-off that you can make to help define your values. This is the idea of anti-values. These describe the values that you aren’t going to try to use.
By making these explicit (describing the negative space), they further emphasise the values that you have chosen. These can be one of 2 options:
- A bad behaviour that is common in other companies
- A good behaviour that is common in other companies
I may talk more about this at some point in the future. For the time being, I’ll just say that the most interesting of these two is the latter. Breaking from common norms often leads to valuable differentiation.
Embrace the tension
Values can be really useful, but they require a lot of work to avoid being meaningless platitudes. If there are trade-offs or tension in them, it really helps to make these explicit. Done thoughtfully, this makes them even more potent.
