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July 9, 2006

Driving Action with "Values"

In most conversations about how to properly focus an organization for success, the prescription calls for the organization to leverage its identity as a source of performance strength. For doing that, the notion of "values" is promoted as a major success factor.

What makes "values" so important? The key ideas are that it is typically easier to maintain effort for what one believes in, and that not knowing what matters the most "internally" leads to an inability to sort out and navigate through what matters the most "externally".

In trying to make "values" an integral part of operations, the organization will typically develop priorities; then it will group and cascade the priorities into policies -- ones that can be applied as instructions accompanying activies that the organization anticipates it should conduct or host.

While policies provide the practical expression of the priorities, many organizations are only partially successful at providing them and even creating them. The initial challenge in developing the priorities is usually to decide not just what is considered to be a representative "value" but also to get agreement on why it is necessary to hold onto it. The challenge is made tougher by the fact that the circumstances surrounding the organization may be constantly changing in important ways demanding direct attention. Further, the identified priorities may seem to compete with or even contradict each other.

Consequently, this period of investigation and definition takes many forms and often must be repeated -- but while no two organizations may arrive at the same conclusions, they all try to arrive at them through what will be called a "value system" -- some model for evaluation that is persistent above and beyond the level of ordinary circumstantial change. This sytem will then govern, more or less, the ongoing refinement and validation of priorities and policy -- at least until again too many new occasions prove to be irreconcilable within that system.

When this roadblock occurs, individuals or organizations experience conflicted priorities as indicators of a defect or breakdown of the value system. But in this experience, it can be unclear as to whether the apparent conflict is really due to the system or instead due to a lack of rigor or understanding within its use. For example, rules are often seen as the specific expression of a priority. Sometimes in using them, there may be confusion about whether an undesirable situation -- meaning, one in which prior action has turned things sour or subsequent action will likely do so -- has been forced by "a bad rule", or whether instead a good rule has been inappropriately applied. The conflict stems from uncertainty about the correctness of what was done or of what to do.

This example is notable because the action that makes the situation "undesirable" normally derives its justification from the presumed value system. When the undesirability of the situation makes us debate the system's own correctness, we tend to wonder if the system is unfairly "skewed" one way or the other. Meanwhile, the conflicted priorities that come with the undesirable situation may be a disagreement between two or more parties, but the conflict can also be a disagreement that one party feels within itself.

An important part of a value system's responsibility is to provide a means of distinguishing the character of one action from another. A critical understanding of the importance attached to "value systems" is that they are focused on why things should or should not be done a certain way -- not on what the actual results are. But perhaps most important of all is that a value system's force comes first from its ability to identify and describe things, not from asking it to measure things. That is, a value system is a perspective, not a set of scales.

With that in mind, the discussion below takes a look at how the essential form of a "value system" works to provide critically distinctive identification (not measurement) in a "situation at hand".

To begin with an example, the following picture shows a highly generic framework, intended to more precisely declare the main factors that go into the often fuzzy notion of "values". These factors are what goes into actual decision-making in "real time".

In an ideal situation, this framework would represent an organization's or individual's "mindset" -- one with consistent awareness across all of the framework's factors. That is, there would be an equal and simultaneous grasp of what is "responsible" or not, and what is "right" or not. Armed with that awareness, the character of the action that is possible at any moment could be evaluated as one of a few basic types -- for example as being "virtuous" or being a "gamble".

The framework identifies these basic types by introducing and cross-referencing a major distinction between acts and beliefs -- which respectively translate into the corresponding difference between ethics and morals.

This framework can offer the terms that it uses without the burden of emotional and philosophical histories, because it is not concerned with persuasion but rather with description. All descriptive systems have built-in assumptions, and this framework is not an exception; however the purpose of the framework is completely explicit, with no ulterior motive -- and therefore it can easily be used or ignored according to the practical interest of the observer. It's not that one must compare acts and beliefs, but rather that one usually can.

Two important assumptions in the framework are indicated by the lower left and upper right tags added to the central 4x4 grid. (Arrows are also supplied to signify these assumptions in the diagram.)

The first assumption is that Laws are primarily concerned with enforcing behavior away from transgression and towards virtue. (Moving behavior both higher and towards the right eventually would converge in virtue.)

The second assumption is that Principles are primarily concerned with defining and promoting behaviors that meet acceptable standards. Principles "pull" behavior towards them.

The lower left and upper right regions in this framework are readily comparable. But what is among the most interesting experiences of our society and social value systems is that we are constantly bumping into behaviors that occupy the "middle zone" of sacrifice and gambling.

For example, with sacrifice, a person discovers, perhaps unexpectedly, that they feel an innate (not externally imposed) responsibility to do something that they actually did not otherwise believe was "right". The very occasion itself exposes the difference between what they recognize as acceptable from the standpoint of need, versus from the standpoint of preference. As very dramatic samples, commiting a mercy killing or submitting oneself to bullying in order to protect someone else both fall into this category. As a very mundane sample, giving up properly ("rightfully") earned profit in order to placate a confused customer falls into this category.

In the case of gambling, circumstances are such that the gambler (the actor) often knows a gamble is being taken when others cannot tell. TV shows regularly feature examples of this, where with the best intentions detectives search crime scenes without a warrant, or prosecutors try to use the "fruit of the poisoned tree". Yet sometimes the actor is doing something with self assuredness about rightness, while unaware of how it might be irresponsible. This latter case is accounted for by the framework, but in our discussion the framework is primarily interested in the awareness that motivates the actor. How does the actor decide to do something "irresponsible" in order to do something "right"?

The thinking behind this framework additionally assumes that the actor chooses to gamble -- to take an irresponsible action -- due to his perception of need, while the preference to cause something "desirable" is normally what actually provides the actor with his "justification". Clearly, this is the formula for pragmatism, or the idea that the ends justify the means. The problem lies in whether the "desirable" is also what's "right".

On the other corner, back to sacrifice, actors and their critics often mistakenly judge sacrifice as pragmatism. The judgement error lies in not realizing that sacrifice is not about the ends but instead about the means. Compared to gambling, sacrifice is about not having a choice in how to proceed and doing what is possible instead of doing nothing. This is why "heroes" are not always seen as "the good guys", even though they are usually distinguishable from anyone who is not heroic. Heroism is a way of being that is actually not defined by results. A sad and common example of this is the case of dysfunctional personal relationships wherein one party is routinely heroic but with only the effect of propagating a bad relationship. Likewise, heroic corporate leaders can quickly take the company to ruin. By the way, these examples only reinforce that the actor's overall frame of reference is the dominant one behind the activity. Meanwhile, external observers might readily conclude that the heroism was "noble" but still "not right". (Gambling is generally not seen as being noble.)

The above comments tend to suggest that action is based on needs while beliefs are based on preference -- and that suggestion is intentional even if conceptually experimental. Assuming the suggestion is valid, there is notably still no reason why both need and preference would be unaltered over time by experience and education, or by each other. So it is not a simple opposition of "needs vs. preference" that is unlikely to be valid -- rather, it is the actor's sophistication about the two of them that will make their opposition more or less complex and reconcilable.

We see this continuing dialog between them on a grand scale in the court system, where laws and principles tussle with each other for control of the interpretation to be applied to sacrifices and gambling -- to idiosyncratic heroism and to pragmatism. In light of the framework's clinical terms, the history is saturated with debates over things that seemed ethical but immoral, and things that seemed moral but unethical. Often, the challenge is to "unload" the labels of their psychological baggage, so that the important contrasts and comparisons can be made between the context that declares "right/wrong" (correct/incorrect) and the context that declares "responsible/irresponsible" (proper/improper).

On a corporate scale (i.e., a microsociety), requirements wrestle with policies to control the interpretation (and exploitation) of "opportunities". A company will agree that a lucrative and reasonable proposal should be accepted, but it will disagree that a non-executive should make the deal. The idea and goal of the deal might be right, but the non-executive taking charge of the transaction is irresponsible.

On a personal and private scale, roles wrestle with desires and wind up shaping personalities and relationships. In this discussion, the personal level is really not intended to be directly explored any further, but the recognition of the dynamic is not difficult on a personal level, so the discussion has leveraged this fact to help reinforce support of the framework's idea at other levels of organization or influence.

What clarification does the framework present, finally, about the notion of "values" ? The main clarification is that "values" are an idealized way of pointing at something more specific -- namely, the prescription for the balancing of beliefs and acts. But the framework shows that values come in a range from unambiguously good to unambiguously bad. Naturally we promote the "good", but this doesn't logically eliminate the others nor their actual practice.

The other key clarification is that the influence of values on action is by will of the actor -- meaning that values are not inherently compelling. Instead, the value system has to propose definitions of right and wrong, and propose definitions of responsible and irresponsible -- and the acting party (individual or organization) still has to find reasons to position itself within the range of values generated.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at July 9, 2006 10:22 AM

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