The standard approaches to discovering and using organisational values is flawed. It is difficult to think of the hundreds of values, its hard to agree on them, and it is next to impossible to embed and measure them in the organisation. Most don't know the difference between a good or a bad value.
Management teams struggle to build a culture, because there is no structure or method that is ambiguous. There is nothing to simplify it. It is difficult to cross from theory to practical. How does discpline equate to the workplace. How do you embody discipline? How do you meeasure it? What does it mean to the advertising campaign, the marketing department is working on? Does integrity include truth telling? How much truth?
There is theory of personal and organisation values and how they affect culture and decision making, and then there is the reality of life, work and every day decisions. No wonder, most blurbs on corporate websites are just token words. No wonder, culture eats strategy for breakfast.
AMMERSE for Organisations
AMMERSE makes discovering your values easier. You still have to communicate and discuss it, but its a much simpler task with AMMERSE. AMMERSE is theory made practical. It draws a straight line from the notion of the value to the reality of the decision and the actions. It allows you to build on what you know, rather than trying to map reality on the oretical values. AMMERSE gives you the language and the tools to make building culture and strategy easier.
AMMERSE is a mnemonic for:
- Agile
- Minimal
- Maintainable
- Environmental
- Reachable
- Solvable
- Extensible
These are easy once you get the hang of it.
"Where would you place "solving customers problems" - Solvable?
"Being timely and available to others in the team" - Reachable?
"Diligent" - Perhaps a bit harder, but doable.
If you are diligent, you are someone who keeps note, does things correctly, in sequence. It is the act of maintaining something. You can create a checklist and do it diligently, you can know a task and conduct it diligently. A task is usually outcome and value oriented, so therefore it solves a problem.
Diligent people solve and maintain solutions to problems. (Maintainable, Reachable and Solvable).
But wait, you say, is it not Minimal too? It could be. Perhaps diligence is maintaining a minimal solution? Maybe. But you could also be diligently following a cumbersome set of tasks, that are not Minimal.
We can assign weights to the values to be a little more specific.
We can say Reachable (1), Maintainable (1) Solvable (1) and Minimal (0.5)
By writing it like this, we are saying that 'diligence' (the way we understand it), is 100% Reachable, 100% maintainable, 100% Solvable and 50% Minimal. Instead of saying "diligence" was can say the nature of what we want our solutions to be and how we act on them.
Let us take another example:
Company A and B are both customer-centric. What does this really mean?
Company A may decide that it means, build features for customers when they ask. The manager is always talking about customers and doing surveys.
Company B, may boost their support desk and decide it means picking up the phone within 30 seconds or replying to tickets within two minutes.
Are they wrong? What are they not doing?
What does customer-centric mean to a marketing person, who is about to roll out a campaign for a new car brand? What does it mean to a software development team, building cloud infrastructure, who follow their own methodology and don't really see customers?
Customer centricity is not a value, it is a data point, like the problem. The problem may be to help customers do x. This is Solvable. It may be that you wish to respond to customers timely. and that your teams should be more agile, so they can solve problems quicker. In this case, what you really want is:
Reachabe (1), Agile (1), Solvable (1)
You wish to be reachable, and the ability to reach solutions in an agile way.
Agile is feedback oriented.
Reachable is within budget, cost, skills and availability.
Solvable is solving problems.
So what you want are agile oriented, pragmatic, continuously learning and refining processes that aim in the solving of problems for customers.
Let's say Company B disagrees. They think like this.
Minimal (1), Maintainable (1), Solvable (1), Extensible (1)
These values are different. On the surface, they are both customer-centric, but they accomplish it differently.
The values
Agile
Agility (A) is being light-footed and nimble. It means you want to get feedback and make adjustments. You want to rely on agility to discover and build your products. You will often talk to customers to find out what they need. You are keen on agility in products.
Personally, agile is continuously learning and not being stuck in a set mindset. It means being open-minded and willing to adapt to feedback.
On an organisational level, it means you promote agile processes and values where you work iteratively, solicit feedback and welcome change.
Minimal
Minimal (Mi) is finding the balance between fit for purpose and effort. It does not mean the least you can do, or doing things simply, but more a case of finding a streamlined, lean approach, where solutions are elegant and usable, for now and the future. The "least you can do" could be doing nothing, so it means more than that. It reduced over engineering and over working or clutter. Streamlining a solution means you have clarity of exactly what is the working component.
Maintainable
Maintainable (M) is ensuring that you conduct maintainance on yourself and your work. Ensuring that something is maintainable is a part of the solution process. Designing a solution that is unmaintainable is a negative. Maintainable is also about improving processes and ensuring that everything we do is sustainable.
Environmental
Environmental (E) is understanding that we operate in a system, not alone. Everything we do, interacts with other things. A department interacts with another, an organisation interacts with the economy and so on. Contextually speaking, things change and evolve and systems are affected by our decisions. A large company has an inherent culture and "operating system", if you introduce something to the system, you should understand how it will play out. Context is everything, and things that work 'here', wont always work 'there'.
Reachable
Reachable (R) pertains to all the ideas of reaching for or being reached. Reaching a goal, being able to reach with respect to time and budget are all part of reaching. Do you know how to reach it? It may be a software app, but you are not a coder, but you know someone who can do it. Reaching is all about capabilities.
Solvable
Solvable (S) is about solving problems and providing value. Every person feels valuable when they accomplish something worthwhile and every business must solve real problems to survive. Solving todays problems and tomorrows problems can invovle different tactics. Not making meta problems is just as important
Extensible
Extensible (Ex) is creating things that can be extended easily. It is similar to Agile but it focuses on the ability to extend a solution, not adapt it. Sometimes you need to extend a solution to new problems, without changing the existing. Extensibility is just about stability as it is agility.
Reflect
Reflect on these seven values and how you relate to them. Are you a reach the solution no matter what, or an agility is important to everything we do, sort of person? Do you enjoy stability over agility, or solving as many problems as you can over minimal?
Have the discussion
What are the values of the organisation? Are you an Extensible company or a Minimal company? Perhaps you are minimal for design, and maintainable only internally, not for customers.
Vision vs Reality
An organisation is organic and composed of values from everyone. Your culure may not be what you want. What is the gap between your vision and the reality?
What is the gap between your view of your customer relations and what customers are really saying?
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