Walking the talk - musings on values and behaviour
03 November, 2011 at 9:12 AM
Last week we hosted a session at the exuberant Changemaker’s Fayre curated by the newest addition to the Hub family - Hub Westminster. Perched on the 1st floor of New Zealand House and moments from Trafalgar Square, this Hub has already attracted a diverse and dedicated posse of changemakers and the fayre brought together and celebrated the wider community.
West Lexham teamed up with Reboot- creators of Reboot Camp which was held for the first time at West Lexham this summer. We share a common interest in bringing people into deep contact with their intention and their values in order to focus and refresh their energy for their work. The stunning natural environment and big blue skies of our corner of Norfolk provide a connection to nature that amplifies the experience. The rhythm of the day and night, which so often can fade away as we burn the midnight oil, shapes the weekend as participants are woken by birds greeting the morning sun and go to bed warm from the fire under a starry sky.
The session at Hub Westminster was about the ongoing work of seeking to ‘be the change’ while we are busy making the change. How can we embed our values into every aspect of our life and work? How to Walk the Talk when the going is tough? Joined by participants from diverse backgrounds from a refugee from the City escaping a clash of values to a student taking a year out to find his passion, we sat down to address this question through an open conversation. The talented Jenny Chan was ready with pen and easel to capture in images the flow of concepts that emerged.
We talked about conflicting values, and different values for different times and spaces in our lives. We looked at the challenge of speaking out in an environment of apparently uniform values if you hold different ones. We examined where values comes from in an organisation – top down? Bottom up? – and how a break in shared values between leadership and employees can lead to disenchantment and rifts. Sometimes the leadership values change, sometimes the values of the individual within the organisation change. Is this a natural attrition which comes with size as an organisation grows? How can we stay on the same page as we grow. Important for me was the idea that values change- or rather they fade in and out of significance in response to context. We all hold many values, some which might conflict, and the values which emerge in a certain situation might inform our behaviour.
I went to bed buzzing with questions and the next morning arrived to a meeting of Unltd Future – aprototype incubation programme for sustainable social enterprises- to be held at Hackney City Farm. I was greeted by ducks and chickens ruffling around the yard, busy about their breakfast and social scene. We’re all so different and we might present different agendas and different values, but don’t we all love a bit of breakfast, the sun on our backs and the company of others? Shared values and conflicting values form parts of a whole and our responses to each other are a constant renegotiation of relationship, space and resources, like the fussy dance of the ducks and chickens in the yard.
Once the serious business of incubation got underway we settled into the familiar back and forth of sharing and responding. The focus of the session was how to identify and measure social and environmental impacts. What change are we making and how do we know? We were introduced to the Common Cause Handbook – a guide to values and frames (the lenses through which we experience something in the context of values)- which draws together social psychology and research on values from all over the world to provide helpful tools for understanding. For me a crucial point made in the handbook was that in our communications around a cause and our attempts to influence behaviour we can reinforce a value which might conflict with those we are ostensibly hoping to convey e.g. I might think that persuading someone to use less power with the added incentive that it saves them money is encouraging them to be more conscious of damage to the environment, but perhaps I am simply reinforcing the importance of money as a guide to right behaviour?
Understanding values and behaviour change is incredibly complex and any conclusions are rarely clear cut, but thinking in this way about some of the feedback we get from people who have come to West Lexham might help to understand the values that come to the fore for people here and how they are impacted by their experience. I’m left with more questions than answers about the impact and importance of values, it’s a slippery fish, but it feels central to the work we are all doing and I hope we can find ways to further incorporate our understanding of values and behaviour into our visions for a more sustainable world.