Values Archives

Image of compass in glass orb - metaphor for setting direction

#046 – Compass Headings – Setting your Direction

21/12/2021 by Mike Clargo

Clarify the difference you want to make in this world – Build on the totem exercise to translate hope into action

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Why take this challenge?

Translate your values into clear goals, direction and statements of intent

Align your impact and influence with the difference you want to be in the World

Create a direction that makes you proud in what you achieve

Graphic image reflecting different pathways to take the adventure

In last week’s adventure – Carve your Totem – we looked at values, and what is most important to you. We talked about what it means to value, and the role of sacrifice therein.

In this week’s adventure we will be building on this. We will be working to identify the direction you want to take, and the difference you want to make in respect of your values. The mark you want to leave on this World.

It seems appropriate to include this just before the end of this series of adventures.

+ Green track - taking it in your stride

Immediate value

Take a look back at your values from last week – the things that are important to you. Is there one in which you could make a real practical difference right now? Something you could choose to do differently in the next 15 minutes. A choice which could contribute in some tangible way to making progress on that value.

If so, the green track is ‘just do it’. Make a choice right now to do something differently that will make an impact.

+ Blue track - a bit of a workout (click to open)

Threshold of Pride

Review your values from last week, and consider which you feel is the most pressing for you to build upon in the coming year. The one you would most like to have made a difference in over the next 12 months.

Then imagine yourself at the end of the coming year, reflecting back on your direction and progress on this value, and the position you want to be in at the end. What is your threshold of pride? What needs to have been achieved for you to begin to feel proud of what you did?

Write up your answer, and stick it somewhere that you will reflect on it at the beginning of each day. Commit to refreshing your mind with the direction you feel right now each time you see this definition.

That’s it. Do this religiously and you may be suprised as to the progress you make. Our subconscious behaves teleologically, it becomes more alert to things we deliberately focus on. Many people first become aware of this phenomena when they hear a ‘new’ word for the first time, and have someone explain it to them. They are then surprised by the coincidence of hearing it again shortly after. Except it is not coincidence. It is just that our subconscious is more sensitised to picking it up.

In respect of our goals, this same effect makes us more likely to spot related opportunities. We become what we think most about.

+ Red track - stepping up to bat (click to open)

Systemic Values

The blue track can help you make more progress than you might imagine. And yet, if your values really are something so important to you that you desire to make sacrifices for them? Then you might prefer to ensure those sacrifices come together in an efficient and effective plan of action.

The red track is about applying the direction provided by the blue track in a more comprehensive and systematic manner. To describe success around more of your most important values. And to develop a personal action plan to deliver that.

Begin with extending your threshold(s) of pride to encompass all of your values as you have defined them. Then work out the ‘what, when, where and how’ of getting there. If what you need to do is obvious then it is just a matter of determining your will and your schedule. But if it is more complex you might find the pack resources useful.

You may find the following resources helpful in tackling your challenge or in gaining further benefits from the skills and insights you develop

Forcefield Analysis helps map the influences on you in successfully delivering your values.
Why How Charting enables you to better see the connections between your values and your goals.
Strategic engagement matrix enables you to systematically and strategically support your values through your ways of working.
Threshold of Pride helps you to identify the best level of achievement (for you) in all of this.

To catch up on past adventures you may have missed, feel free to browse our Adventures Library

Let us know how you get on.
Share your experience, your insights and your observation using the comments section at the bottom of the Linkedin post.

Please help us to extend and develop our community by sharing what you are doing. Click on the links below where you are most active, and then like or share the article to your network. Thank you for helping.

And share your progress and insights with the Twitter LbA community using #leadingbyadventure

Useful links:

Introduction to Leading by Adventure  |  What we mean by spirituality?  |  Why Adventure
Adventures to date   |  I did it, but it didn’t work very well   |  How do I know if it is working
Bringing this thinking into your meetings   |  Adventure & Mental Health
Leading by Adventure community   |  Explore Strategic Support options

Image of totem poles as a reflection of personal values

#045 – Carve your Totem – Define your values

14/12/2021 by Mike Clargo

Develop greater insight into your personal values and their role in influencing your thinking – Use modelling and metaphor to explore what is important to you

Please help us to get the word out in just two clicks – click here – then click the like button

Why take this challenge?

Gain greater influence over the shape of things around you

Increase the fulfilment and satisfaction from your work

Better align ‘being’ and ‘doing’ – your identity and your actions

Graphic image reflecting different pathways to take the adventure

Values are described as: principles or standards of behaviour; one’s judgement of what is important in life.

Unfortunately, most people’s experience of them is as a list of ‘nice to have’ corporate platitudes, framed and hung on a wall. Things to aspire to as long as they do not get in the ways of profit and performance.

But how do we actually value something? What is it that actually gives that something ‘value’? I would argue that we only really ‘value’ something if we are willing to sacrifice other things we value in order to attain or preserve it – time, money, position, reputation, …. If we can work out what we will sacrifice things for, we can identify what it is we really value. It could be a long list.

But what tops that list? Identifying our most important values can help guide us in making good choices and reinforcing a sense of integrity in ourselves.

This week’s adventure is all about identifying your values, and drafting a visual reflection of them in the form of a totem pole.

+ Green track - taking it in your stride

Identifying values

Make a list of 5 times you can remember being at your happiest. Make another list of 5 times when you most felt a real sense of pride. And make a final list of 5 times when you most felt a sense of achievement or fulfilment. It is okay if there are overlaps between these lists.

Then consider what was actually happening that led to these feelings within you? What was ‘winning out’ and what was ‘being beaten’? Do these answers reflect things that you would make sacrifices to regain?

Spend a bit of time with these answers, and try and represent them symbolically as drawings or images (or even models) – the most important at the top, and then coming down in a column?

If you can do this, the visual component will help significantly in you better re-assimilating them. But if that is not working for you, please translate them into five sentences which begin with the words: “I value …”?

Once you have done this, place them somewhere prominent, and reflect on them (maybe over the next few days). Feel free to adapt them or change them as you get more familiar with what they mean to you. And consider how this reflection may be helping you in your thinking on other things.

+ Blue track - a bit of a workout (click to open)

Systemic values delivery

Values do inherently influence our behaviours and choices. But if our true values are not particularly clear to us, this can be an inefficient process. As a result we can find ourselves being drawn in directions that do not help us. And we can waste opportunities to influence our situation positively.

Back in adventure #035 we looked at how we feed different aspects of our character. We can do something similar with our values.

On a sheet of A4 paper, draw a grid 6 squares wide and 6 deep. Then in the first column, write ‘Activities’ in the first box, and make a list of 5 specific things you did yesterday in the boxes below.

In the 5 remaining boxes along the top row, write down (or draw) your 5 values. Then in the other boxes: Firstly, take a black pen and write down how each activity helped you deliver each of your values; Secondly take a different colour pen and write down ways in which they could have helped further.

Thirdly ask yourself three questions. One, would reflecting on my values when I started this activity have helped me have more impact in line with my values? Two, am I doing the right balance of activities to deliver the value I want to deliver? And three, am I actually making the sacrifices I am willing to make for these values?

Consider what you will to do about the result.

+ Red track - stepping up to bat (click to open)

Team Values

Consider repeating the exercise for your team meetings.

Do you already have values that you are pursuing as a team or organisation? If not, work with your team to identify what they should be.

Then repeat the grid from the Blue track on a flipchart or shared whiteboard. But down the left hand side column, write the key sessions in your last meeting. And along the top, write your team values. Then look at how each session helped deliver your values, and its potential to do even more.

Finally, ask the team two of the three questions. One, would reflecting on our values when we started this meeting have helped us have more impact in line with our values? And two, are we doing the right balance of activities to deliver the value we want to deliver?

Consider as a team what you will to do about the result.

You may find the following resources helpful in tackling your challenge or in gaining further benefits from the skills and insights you develop

To catch up on past adventures you may have missed, feel free to browse our Adventures Library

Let us know how you get on.
Share your experience, your insights and your observation using the comments section at the bottom of the Linkedin post.

And share your progress and insights with the Twitter LbA community using #leadingbyadventure

Useful links:

Picture of wolf, based on the two wolves story about feeding character

#035 – Two wolves – Feeding Character

05/10/2021 by Mike Clargo

Understand how your current activities and practices are feeding character – Use the story of the two wolves to better support your growth as an adventurer

Please help us to get the word out in just two clicks – click here – then click the like button

Why take this challenge?

Review your progress in developing an adventure mindset to change

Identify strategies to deliver the attitudes and skills you need to embrace change

Create a culture which better supports mental health in response to change

Graphic image reflecting different pathways to take the adventure

A popular legend has a Cherokee elder teaching his grandson about the two wolves which fight inside us all – one wolf is darkness and despair, and the other is light and hope. In response to the child’s question “Which one wins?” he answers “The one you feed!”

This story about feeding character is popular, because we all experience it. We can relate to the fight, and we have seen the truth in the answer.

But, our reality is that there is more that one pair of wolves fighting inside our minds and our hearts. The tensions that they wrestle with extend in many different dimensions beyond good and evil.

The wolves that we have been most concerned about in the Leading by Adventure series are essentially those of adventure: courage; curiosity; creative confidence, versus those of victimhood: anxiety; stubbornness; habit. And over the weeks we have been providing a varied diet of perspective, insight, opportunity,…

But the reality is this may not be enough, not if every thing else around you – gossip, media, worry – is feeding the other wolf.

So the adventure this week is for you to take a practical look at your own approach to feeding character, and to think about whether you want to change the balance of the time you spend in the various food-stores.

+ Green track - taking it in your stride

Analysing how we are feeding character

The green track is quite simple. Take a sheet of paper and divide it into two columns, one for each of the two wolves. At the top of the left column write: anxiety; stubbornness; habit, and at the top of the right write: courage; curiosity; creative confidence.

Then think back over the last 24 hours, and how you spent your time. And where that time fed one or other column, write in that column what was happening which provided that food.

At the end of it, look at your two columns, and ask yourself how you feel about the balance of what emerged. Whether your time, and where you spend it, and what you focus on within that, is feeding character in the way that best equips you for the right wolf to win.

And if the answer is ‘not yet’, think about one or two simple changes you want to make in order to shift that balance.

+ Blue track - a bit of a workout (click to open)

Feeding team ‘character’

At an appropriate meeting, raise the topic of ‘feeding character’ with your team. Perhaps share the work you did on the green track with them. And then use a flipchart to capture how team meetings and other activities are feeding the character of the team. Which wolf does each agenda item, report, document, behaviour and practice tend to feed (if either).

Then explore with the team whether you want to shift this balance so that the right wolf gets better fed, and what changes might be made in order to introduce a better diet in feeding character.

Some of this may involve making sacrifices, but that speaks to the heart of what ‘character’ actually is. Values have ‘value’ precisely because we are willing to sacrifice (pay) other indulgences to attain them.

+ Red track - stepping up to bat (click to open)

Steady nourishment?

Both the preceding tracks are one-off exercises. But we know that culture rarely changes in a sustainable way from an isolated activity. Consider whether the activities you conducted above are things that could benefit from regular review.

At its simplest level this could be a periodic repeat of the green and/or blue track exercises and the proposal of further improvement actions out of this.

But such regular review could also include an analysis of progress on how all of the organisational values are being fed.

You may find the following resources helpful in tackling your challenge or in gaining further benefits from the skills and insights you develop

To catch up on past adventures you may have missed, feel free to browse our Adventures Library

Let us know how you get on.
Share your experience, your insights and your observation using the comments section at the bottom of the Linkedin post.

And share your progress and insights with the Twitter LbA community using #leadingbyadventure

Useful links:

Integrative Complexity - Mural of Donald Trump

Integrative Complexity – Or why I should listen to Donald

31/01/202301/03/2021 by Mike Clargo

What should be my response to an increasingly divided society, and those who seem to be intent on dividing it further?

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Dr Sara Savage is a friend, a psychologist and a renowned world expert on something called ‘Integrative Complexity’. She uses it to understand terrorism and to work with those who are at risk of radicalisation. (Although she is on the side of the Angels of course).

And when I listen to Sara, and her insights, I begin to realise how we are ALL in imminent danger of also being radicalised.

We become radicalised when we see things too simplistically; when our values become polarised; when we stop understanding things deeply enough that we are forced to balance those values; and to work with those who balance them differently.

Radicalisation occurs when our values become so focused and exclusive that we stop understanding those on the other side of the argument. Radicalisation is what leads to a section of the population physically attacking their seat of government.

Integrative Complexity is about maintaining a wider viewpoint

And the fact is, it is not ‘them’. It is ‘us’. We may be being radicalised in the opposite direction, but we are still being radicalised.

The world has become more complex, not less, but our societal response to it is to run away from it. To seek sound bites, to look for simplistic certainty in our media rather than balanced but unresolved arguments, to surround ourselves with only those voices that are easy for us to identify with.

And the way I can recognise that radicalisation is taking place in me, is because I find myself struggling to appreciate the motives of those who continue to support the 45th US President and accept his stories.

And while I realise that I am not alone in this (nearly all my network feels the same), that does not make me right. In fact it is far more likely to mean that I am a victim of my own echo chamber. And I suspect that you probably are too – whichever side of the debate you are on.

And the problem with that is that if we don’t break out of it … it is only going to get worse.

Protester with placard reading 'I want to be Heard' reflecting the need for Integrative Complexity

Integrative Complexity is key to moving forward. If I cannot value ‘the other side’ as people … Or follow their logic and conclusions … And if I refuse to appreciate their perspectives … Then how do I understand and respect them?

And if I don’t understand and respect them … Why would they talk with me?v

And if we are not talking … How do I pose the questions that might bring mutual appreciation and care? And if I cannot use language to resolve a widening gulf … What options are left to me, or indeed to them?

In Leading by Adventure this week (2nd March 2021) the Red Track challenge is to take something mainstream that you fundamentally disagree with, and understand what leads people to follow it.

You don’t have to come to agree with it. You just have to reach a point where you can understand why someone in different circumstances might. Where you can even see how, under different circumstances, you may have been drawn into it too. And where you can begin to recognise that someone who holds those views is another person not that radically different to you.

Because if we cannot truly appreciate our humanity in each other, the only option we leave ourselves is to demonise. And as self-fulfilling prophecies go, that is not going to be a good one to experience.