Designing values that stick

Cover the logo on five different company values pages and try to sort them back to their companies. You cannot. Excellence, integrity, innovation, ownership, impact: the same words in a different order, describing every organisation that has ever filed accounts. That interchangeability is the whole problem, and the fix is not a better workshop. Values that stick are written as decision rules that cost something to follow, and wired into the places where decisions actually get made: hiring, promotion, weekly rituals, feedback.

Values fail when they are aspirational nouns that never force a hard call. A value that has never made a decision harder is not a value. It is decoration, and everyone in the building can tell the difference between the two, usually within a week of the launch.

Why most values projects fail

A values project usually starts with a workshop, runs through three rounds of wordsmithing, ends in a poster, and quietly stops mattering inside a year. The team that wrote them feels good. The team that has to live by them does not notice the difference. This is the same failure that sinks most change programmes: the artefact ships, the behaviour does not.

Three deaths kill values work, and they are predictable enough to design around.

Designed by committee. Every word gets sanded down to the point where nobody could disagree with it. The sharp phrase that one exec pushed back on gets softened, then softened again, until it describes a company that could be anyone. Nobody disagrees. Nobody changes anything either. The mechanism is quiet and it is nearly universal: the last person to edit the sentence is the one who removes the only word with teeth.

Costless. A value that does not force a trade-off shapes no decision. "Customer obsession" is costless until it slips a launch date because the customer signal is not yet there. "Long-term thinking" is costless until it actually costs you a quarter and the board asks why. If you cannot name, in advance, the decision a value will make harder, you have written a preference, not a value. Preferences are free. Values are supposed to hurt in the moment you most want to ignore them.

Unwired. The value lives on a page and nowhere else. Not in the hiring loop, not in the promotion rubric, not in the retro where the team picks apart last week's calls. Wiring is the entire difference between a value and a slogan. A slogan is a value with the operating connections cut.

What values that stick are made of

The values that shape a company are not single words. They are units, and each unit carries four parts. Miss any one and the value goes soft.

That is the unit. Three to five of them, written by the exec team in the room, argued through, signed off by name. Not by a committee that dilutes as it goes. Not by an external facilitator who hands you a laminated deck and an invoice. The statement without the behaviour is a mood. The behaviour without the anti-pattern is advice. The anti-pattern without a named cost is a rule nobody will pay for when it counts. All four, or it does not hold.

The reason this works is the same reason the Read, Craft, Scale method works on anything else: you are designing the value at the level of the actual decision, not the level of the slogan. Designing the value is Craft. Wiring it in is Scale. That order is not optional.

Three values, fully designed

Abstract advice about values is itself a kind of poster. Here is what the unit looks like when it is finished, for three values a real company might hold. Notice that each cost is a sentence an exec would flinch to say out loud, which is exactly how you know it is a value and not a preference.

None of those three is elegant. That is the point. An elegant value is usually one that has had its cost edited out. Run your own drafts through the same table: if the "cost" column comes out blank or bland, the value is not finished, whatever the statement sounds like.

Wiring values into how the company runs

Once the values exist, the work is wiring them into how the company actually operates. Four surfaces, in the order they pay off.

Hiring loops. One interview in every loop explicitly probes a value with a scenario from real work. Not "tell me about a time you showed integrity," which teaches candidates to perform. A specific situation where the value would have forced a trade-off, told as it happened. The signal is whether the person has ever actually made that trade-off and what they chose when it cost them. This is the same instinct as hiring for the grain: you are testing for how someone works under pressure, not what they claim to believe.

Promotion criteria. Each level expectation gets rewritten through the value lens. If one of the values is "ship in public," then senior IC at this company means posting the rough version in the open channel two weeks before the polished one, and that expectation sits in the written rubric. Promotions either reinforce the values or they quietly repeal them. Promote the person who lives the opposite of a value and you have just told the whole company which document to trust. There is no neutral promotion.

Weekly rituals. Demos, retros and decision logs reference the values by name. "We made this trade-off because of this value" is a sentence people should hear in a normal week, not a launch event. The reference is the practice. A value spoken aloud in a Tuesday retro is being maintained; a value nobody has named in a month is already fading.

Performance feedback. Specific praise and specific challenge, both grounded in a named value, on the same evidence-led shape as any working coaching and feedback system. "This decision lived our value of X. This other one did not, and here is why." Vague feedback teaches nothing; feedback tied to a named value teaches the value.

If a value is not present in at least three of these four surfaces within ninety days of being adopted, it will not survive the year. This is operating leadership, not brand work, and the difference shows up in the calendar, not the wall.

The draft filter

Before an exec team signs anything, run every candidate value through a short filter. It takes ten minutes and it saves a year of polite decay. The point is to fail values on purpose, in the room, while it is still cheap to rewrite them.

The filter matters most on the fourth question, because that is the failure you cannot see while it happens. The room agrees to soften a phrase to avoid a five-minute argument, and the softening feels like progress. It is the opposite. The friction you edited out was the value doing its one job.

Where AI helps, and where it must not

AI is useful at the edges of values work, never in the middle.

It can pressure-test a draft. Ask a model to write the exact opposite value in equally polished language. If the opposite reads just as reasonable, the original never picked a side, and a value that picks no side rules nothing out. Ask it to rephrase a statement as a forced choice between two attractive options and check the value still selects one. It can also surface patterns across engagement surveys, exit interviews and decision logs that map to particular values, giving the exec team real evidence to argue from rather than anecdote.

What it cannot do is generate the values. A value written by a model is borrowed in the most literal sense, and people can tell the way they can tell a card was signed by an assistant. The exec team has to argue each one out in the room, in their own words, with the cost named openly, because the argument is where the commitment gets made. Skip the argument and you have skipped the value. The model speeds up the testing. The judgement is still yours.

The six-month test

Six months after launch, ask three questions and answer them honestly.

1. Can a randomly chosen employee name the values without checking a page?
2. Can they describe a decision in the last quarter that one of the values visibly shaped?
3. Can the exec team name a decision the values made harder, and explain why they held the line anyway?

Three yeses and the values are alive. Two and they are decaying, and the third question is usually the one that fails first, because it is the only one that costs the leadership anything to answer. One or zero yeses and you do not have values. You have a poster, an onboarding slide, and a year to run the design properly next time.

Revisit the set annually, and treat a value that has never once changed a decision as a candidate for deletion rather than a badge of stability. The goal was never a wall of admirable nouns. The goal is a company that decides the same way whether or not anyone is watching, which is the only definition of values that has ever meant anything on a Monday.