Accessible Disruption - Strategy Table

AD Ep 8 David Allison - Valuegraphics
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David Allison: [00:00:00] Yeah, I want everybody listening to realize when they wake up in the morning, what they are is a values driven being. And if we can all start thinking about everybody we encounter and everybody we're trying to impact with our work in a values driven way, we can make the world a much better place than it is right now.

Podcast Host: The world is changing. For most human beings, change is uncomfortable and challenging to address. Whether you are a startup working on agile processes or a mature organization, navigating change within existing complex structures, the mindset and skills to adapt has never been more vital. The team from the strategy table want to help the wider world understand the need and approach to meaningful and impactful change management, helping organizations navigate disruption and make change accessible to [00:01:00] everyone.

This is Accessible disruption.

Anthony Vade: Welcome to another episode of Accessible Disruption. I am co-founder of the Strategy Table and your co-host of this series, Anthony Vade. And joining me as always is Tira and Dean, co-founder of Strategy Table. And. My favorite co-host. Don't tell Ryan I said that though. I mean it's just 'cause Ryan's not here today.

We have a fascinating guest with us and somebody I've been looking forward to having on this podcast since we first came up with the idea. Someone I've been fanboying and following because of his work in understanding human values, which I think are often overlooked and very often misunderstood as well.

But Tahira, you've known David Alice. For a very long time. Perhaps you could give us a little bit of an insight into who David Allison is to you and some of the work before we allow him to [00:02:00] share his perspective. Of course.

Tahira Endean: David and I met a long time ago in BE Before we were both in the current lives that we're in really, so David had a real estate marketing firm and.

Crazily. I had someone I worked with and he had someone he worked with who for some reason said our bosses would like each other and got us all together for coffee, and then they didn't get to say another word for the next hour, did they? David? So.

David Allison: We,

Tahira Endean: that was the beginning of it. I think we

David Allison: sent them away, didn't we?

We were like, you go, you go now, you go now she and I were staying here. Yeah. Yeah.

Tahira Endean: We just talked and talked and talked and you know, as David moved into value, graphics moved into his speaking career. We've had the opportunity to work together many times. And you know, we talk a lot about change and what it might mean to an organization and who works there and what are the different generations in a workplace, and what are the values that people are bringing and how do [00:03:00] we build on their mission and vision and values to bring everybody together.

And David, you're the master of value graphics and why it matters. So let's talk about. Why values matter in the workplace?

David Allison: Yes, please. Let's talk about that. You know what I'd like to start with though, because people are just hearing the word value graphics for the first time. Yes. We named this way of thinking about people value graphics because it sounds like demographics and psychographics and that was intentional.

And so part of the reason I always like to start by by saying that is. That helps people kinda get a picture of where it sits in the world and what it is, but also because one of my pet peeves is people spelling it value space graphics, which makes us sound like a cheap sign company instead of an organization that helps other organizations understand people.

So one word people. One word. Just like demographics, value, graphics. Um, so. Yeah, let's talk about values. Here's the funny thing [00:04:00] about this. We've all grown up in the business world. Talking about values. How many times have we all been in a meeting where we sit down with the boss and we're talking, okay, mission, vision, values, and talking about values in an organization.

And then you go, and maybe you've been lucky enough to have some personal coach, or you've done some reading through some books that have been written about how do you find your own values. So now we got corporate values, we got personal values. This word values keeps popping up in our worlds all the time.

But here's the problem with it is it's just guessing. It's what I call business poetry. You know, we just sit around and choose pretty words that make us all feel warm and fuzzy and that we think the shareholders are gonna like and say, those are our values. And what we end up with from a corporate values perspective is there's a list of like 12 of them, and every single organization on earth uses the same 12, but in a slightly different order.

So there's like collaboration, environmentalism, and diversity, and yay, those are our words. And we put them up on the wall behind the [00:05:00] reception desk. And those little aluminum cutout letters that are on little pegs, so it throws a really nice little shadow and then we forget about them because they're meaningless.

They're just pretty words that made us all feel good. And then we go to the personal value side and we sit around and you know, if we're talking about these things out loud with people, we say stuff that makes us look like the person we want other people to think we are, as opposed to who we really are.

You know, you put a room full of a hundred people together and say, who? Places an enormous importance on the value of family who's not gonna put up their hand. You know, we all want to be known as somebody who loves our family. Even if you're a serial killer and you just killed your mother and your father, that's been extreme cousins and aunts and uncles, uh,

Tahira Endean: maybe then family's not your first values.

Maybe

David Allison: family's not your first value anyway. There's a lot of people for whom family is not, not one of their most important values. They have other ways of getting their sense of belonging outta the world from. Friends, [00:06:00] community, whatever it might be. So I guess my big story here is that value. We all know they're important.

It's been beaten into us since we first set foot in our very first job on the first day of work. But there hasn't been an accurate way to think about them. It's just been a lot of guesswork and warm fuzzies. And so what we've brought to the table is a way to make them more useful because. Data.

Tahira Endean: Well, you've done some other things too, so you know, you, you do have a lot of data.

I mean, I could, you can tell us the real numbers, you know, more than a million surveys and 185 languages in 58 countries. There's a lot, you've done a lot of data, so let's, you know, say there's a, you have a lot of data around human values.

David Allison: Yeah.

Tahira Endean: And what I think is really interesting about it. Is that you've actually identified 56 human values.

How did you get to 56? I've always wanted to ask this question.

David Allison: Oh, it's a great question. Um, and it's one of the methodological flaws with so many other people who've tried to measure these things is they go in with a list and say, here's a list of values, which ones are yours? [00:07:00] And the problem with that is what you're measuring is, which.

People agree with your list of values, you're not actually finding out what their values are. So these million surveys we've done around the world, we never ask people about their values. What you do instead is you ask 'em about their life and about what are they excited about and what gets 'em up in the morning, and what do they do for hobbies and how do they feel about their sex lives, and what about relationships and what do they do on the weekend?

And when you listen to a million people. Tell you about what they're doing all day. And you understand that the only reason humans do anything is because they're looking for values alignment. So now you can look at all these people doing all these behaviors, doing all these things, all these decisions, all these emotions, all these opinions.

And you know that it's all driven by values. So you pile all that information up and you say, you know what? There's some patterns here. We see some signals in the noise and it turns out there's 56 different things that were [00:08:00] driving people to do all that stuff around the world. The analogy I always use is Halloween candy.

I. You come home with a pillowcase full of candy and you dump it out in the dining room table, that's the data. And you stand back and you look at it and go, well, what do we got here? How can I sort this out? That was the fun part for me. Maybe I was a weird little boy, but I always like sorting it into little piles and like, here's the gum and here's the really good gum and here's the full-sized chocolate bars.

And I wish I could remember where those houses were, 'cause those are the good people on my block. But you don't go into it knowing. What you're gonna get. You go into it and you look at what you got and you put it into piles, and that's what we did. Now, what's important is that there's 56 piles of candy, 56 things we noticed, but each of those piles of candy has lots of different stuff in it.

So the bubblegum pile, there's dozens and dozens of kinds of bubble gum, and so there's 56 values, but each one has a bunch of different meanings, a bunch of different ways. It shows up in people's lives. In fact, there's more than 8,000. Different codes in the value graphics [00:09:00] database for what those values mean to different groups of people in different parts of the world.

Tahira Endean: Which is also really interesting because I know that you have data that breaks down exactly like you just said by geographic regions of the world. And the reality of today's world is that all those geographic regions have immigrated, migrated, moved around the world, and quite often in one office, I. I remember when I worked at Quick Mobile, we had, you know, 150 people in something like 39 home Languages.

But everybody worked, was able to work together to achieve one goal, which was to build a amazing mobile app for the event industry without seemingly too much trouble. So perhaps our values were around other bigger things that mattered more.

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David Allison: Remember, we all only do things because we're looking for values alignment. So other than a few outliers, perhaps in your team that you're talking about, people were there because their values brought them there. There was some set of shared values that motivated people regardless of where they were from in the world and how old they were, and whether they were male or female or rich or poor, or young or old or gay or straight or black or white.

They were all motivated by a set of values to say yes to this job. The ones who were unhappy and left. They were out of alignment, but the values weren't working for 'em. But the ones [00:12:00] who stuck around, if you had a highly functioning team, those are the folks who stuck around because their values were being met.

They were aligned every day when they showed up to work, and it worked out great for them. And it's a really great illustration of why. Looking at people with other lenses like demographics, they don't really make any sense. If you had tried to analyze why that team you were on was a highly functioning team that did some really great work together and had fun doing it using demographics, it wouldn't have made any sense.

You were, I'm sure, all over the map in terms of your demogra, your labels. Who you are on the outside, but on the inside where you couldn't see it. There was a set of values that made you come there and made you enjoy being there and made you feel fulfilled in that spot. We can figure out what that is.

And so for you can imagine for a leadership team being able to understand what are those driving principles that are making this team work or not work. That's. You know, mission critical [00:13:00] information.

Anthony Vade: Okay. I hate to feel like I'm slowing us down, but could we pump the brakes for a second and just take a step back and really dig into and redefine a little bit the difference between a corporate set of values and individual human values?

David Allison: Corporate values are what the CEO. Loves to see on the wall behind the receptionist 'cause it makes 'em feel good. And he knows the shareholders are gonna love that. And there's companies you can hire to come in and help you figure that out. And they charge you a whole bunch of money. And then you get this some number of words that are the same as all the other companies.

And it's a fun thing to do is you take everybody's values, their corporate values, and put 'em all on a piece of paper and say, these are the ones for this company and that company and that company. And then if you move the names around and say, these ones are that company, and ask anybody if they notice.

They won't, 'cause they're all kind of just warm fuzzy words. But what they are attempt to do, I like to call corporate values guiding principles because what they're an attempt to do [00:14:00] by a senior management team is to say, here's how we want you to behave when you come to work. There's a difference between that and the human values that are driving the people who come to work.

So humans show up in an environment where one of the corporate values is cooperation. I. Now humans are motivated by trying to find alignment between their own inner values and every decision they make. So as a management team, if you want people to be cooperative, you need to understand how to sell them that as a behavior based on what their values are.

So let's say that your workforce, your teams, one of their shared values that we've identified with a value graphics profile is, let's say they're off the charts on creativity. It was one of the 56 values, and you want to get them to be cooperative. Well, you need to talk to them about being cooperative, the corporate value in a way that shows them that this is going to enhance their ability to [00:15:00] be creative individuals moving through their life in a creative way.

Why should I be cooperative? Well, because it's going to align with your creativity, and here's the ways we're putting programs and strategies in place and here inside the organization to allow that creativity to flourish. In a cooperative way, so you connect the human values and the corporate values in a way that makes sense for people, and suddenly you're gonna see them actually paying attention to those corporate values.

Ideally, the corporate values aren't just fluffy, nonsense words that have been put up in a wall. What they should be is a reflection of the values of the people who work there, the people that you're serving. Who are your customers, your clients, your constituents, your stakeholders of all sorts. If you can find the place where all of their values are aligned, you get two or three or four values that work across all of those stakeholder groups.

That should be. The set of values for the corporation. Those are true values as opposed to [00:16:00] the way the CEO would like you to behave when you walk into the office. And now it becomes that powerful tool that we all think and know and believe that values should be a way to guide that organization, light the path forward so that you can see where you're headed in a way that makes sense for everybody, for all the stakeholder groups.

Anthony Vade: Maybe let's get a bit into how do we know when we're sharing the same language around this stuff?

David Allison: That's where those definitions come in, right? The ones I always have on the top of my head, because I use them as examples over and over are, are ones like personal responsibility is one of the 56 values, and for some people, we all know that person who likes being the one who gets stuff done and makes lists for the weekend and gets those things done, and that's the only way they feel good about getting through the weekend is if they actually tick some.

I know Tehir is one of these people, an Anthony, I don't know you well enough to know if that's possible for you. If that's plausible for you, but those are the personal responsibility people. One kind of personal responsibility is about only really caring about personal responsibility [00:17:00] as it relates to my stability.

If you know that value is an important one for your stakeholders of some sort, your workforce, your. Clients, your attendees at an event, whatever it might be, and you know that it's about their inner stability, their sense of being in control. That's why personal responsibility means something to them.

Then that's the conditions that need to be present in order for them to feel like that value is aligned. So you need to give them ways. To get stuff done and feel like they are that person because they're searching for what they're trying to avoid is feeling unstable. So the definition for those words becomes very clear when you start to see which of the 8,000 definitions for the 56 values are the ones that apply in any particular situation.

Tahira Endean: One of the tools that you have recently come out with is a values identifier index, which I had the joy and pleasure of going through. There was two things that, so when you and I talked about this, David, because you do know me really well, we have spent a lot of time together discussing these types of things.

You nailed [00:18:00] eight of them, and two of them surprised both of us.

Anthony Vade: Are you

David Allison: willing to share?

Anthony Vade: If you want to hear T Hero's Values Profile, you need to jump over to our website and hear the extended version of this podcast. We'll also give a tease for what Anthony's might be. I. Don't forget to like, subscribe and share your thoughts on this podcast episode. You can access additional resources and of course that extended version, which we'll dive into tahira's profile@strategytable.co.

So many interesting things to consider when it comes to individual personal values. And larger corporate values, uh, it's certainly key to think about the intentionality we put behind understanding all these elements and how can we make sure that we allow teams to [00:19:00] collaborate around their values and understanding each other's values, and create an environment for joyful creativity.

Tahira Endean: All my favorite things, intentions, joy, creativity. Anthony, would you like to take this away and. Wrap it up for us.

Anthony Vade: Yeah, absolutely. Look, we, we've heard a lot and it feels like we've only scratched the surface, but we like to end with the call to action to all of our listeners out there. Uh, and I think it's a simple call to action.

We are very quick to run towards understanding mission, purpose, and values and all of those elements for our corporate side of our business. And we're not saying that's not important, that is in fact vital. But what an opportunity to get to grips with your employees, your workforce, and your. Ancillary connections that help you run your business and understand what they truly value and how that aligns to those great corporate values that you have.

So I want to inspire all of the listeners out there to think about values differently, to, of course, connect with David Allison, look more into value graphics and this. Way of approaching [00:20:00] the challenges that we face in bringing people together, making them cohesive, and making them impactful in the wider world.

Of course, there's gonna be a link in the description for you to learn more about David Allison, if you are listening to the free version of this, there is an extended version of this podcast available on our website where you can jump a little bit deeper into David's work. I'm gonna. Request in the future that we get David back as well to dig a little bit deeper in and hopefully we have my analysis at that point where we can see how aligned we are on all of our values.

David, do you have any closing thoughts you'd like to leave? Is there any call to action you would like to put out to our audience?

David Allison: No, but just, just to realize that, you know, you are not a bundle of labels just because you wear certain labels and that you can be described in certain ways. That doesn't mean that that's anything about who you are.

I always talk about being a member of the lgbtq plus community and that it kind of pisses me off every year when apparently the entire business community thinks my whole life is about glitter and dancing [00:21:00] shirtless on a float. You know, it, it's just, it's just. It's a stereotype, and instead, I want everybody listening to realize when they wake up in the morning, what they are is a values driven being.

I. Trying to find things in their life that align with their values and that that's what drives all of us. Because if we can all start thinking about ourselves that way, it will inevitably force you to think about other people that way. And if we can all start thinking about everybody we encounter and everybody we're try to impact with our work in a values driven way.

We can make the world a much better place than it is right now.

Anthony Vade: What a perfect way to finish this thing off. Thank you, David. Thank you, Tahira. We'll see you on the next Accessible disruption.

Podcast Host: Accessible Disruption is written and spoken by Tahira and Dean Ryan Hill and Anthony Vade. All content is developed in collaboration with the team at Strategy Table [00:22:00] Podcast Production by Experience Design Change Inc. An association with the change lead network. Find more information@strategytable.co.