“A cultural change – a transformation of the corporate culture – is a very exciting topic, BUT, what can we do if we’ve got the worm in the works … and how do we get to grips with it? Colleagues don’t really talk to each other and the connection between management and employees is atrocious… and every change takes forever.”
Many years ago, this was what an entrepreneur friend of mine said when I asked her what she thought about a cultural change based on values in her company.
Her explanations then went into more depth: “We have defined and published our values, we have a mission statement as a screensaver on all computers, there are posters with our mission statement in the canteens. But nobody puts it into practice! What can we do to equip our company with a living set of values and really drive cultural change?”
These words from the entrepreneur about cultural change in companies have accompanied me, Christian Grätsch, for a long time. And today – many years and countless projects later – we have found an answer with the “ValueParty app” and our method for value-based corporate transformation that not only makes culture tangible, but also measurable, thus creating the basis for a targeted approach to cultural change.
The starting signal: The idea behind the “ValueParty” for targeted cultural change
When we started developing the ValueParty, first as a card game and later as an app, our aim was to create a tool that not only makes corporate values visible, but also makes the dynamics within a team or an entire organization tangible. We wanted to make the often abstract concept of cultural change manageable.
Many years earlier, we had become acquainted with the Graves Value System (GVS). With the GVS and the further development of the Spiral Dynamics approach by Beck/Cowan, there is a basis, a system for taking a well-founded and organized look at the often loosely treated topic of “culture”. We have described the 7 “value systems” (memes) named there relatively completely with a total of 112 values. We have thus developed a system to make the culture of your own company discussable.
Making values and culture discussable
When people share a concept of value, it only appears superficially that they are all talking about the same value. But in their minds, everyone has different images, experiences and thoughts about the concept of value. So in order to talk about the same thing, an explanation of the respective values is needed.
In order to minimize speculation and fantasies when discussing one’s own values and thus gain a common understanding of the terminology of the values, we have developed a concrete description for each of the 112 values.
For example, an explanation that everyone can understand and clarify has been added to the generally formulated value “Personal success” (orange meme “Performance”): Personal success: ‘It is important to have challenging goals and to achieve them. It’s a great feeling to reap the harvest!
For example, the following explanation has been added to the very generally formulated value “Consensus” in the “green value system” “Community”: Consensus: It is worth discussing a solution until everyone can agree. Only then will the result be supported and implemented.
With these explanations, which we then worked out for all 112 values of the seven value systems, we made great progress in many workshops. The explanations were seen as a helpful clarification and stimulated discussions on a more sound basis.
Afterwards, workshop participants described it as a great help to know precisely and clearly what was being talked about. “Values” were no longer a “cloud” – they now each had a specific contour.
Concretizing cultural change
We quickly realized that it is not enough to simply define values in order to have meaning, i.e. relevance, they must also be lived. Cultural change does not happen through fine words or posters in the canteen. Values have to be lived in everyday life. But how do you bring an abstract concept like “values” into everyday corporate life?
That’s why we developed a playful format: the ValueParty, a card game that helps teams discuss their values and set clear priorities together.
The first steps were characterized by intensive discussions in our team. The first task was to find something that would allow the individual values, and therefore the value systems, to come into conflict with each other in a playful yet clear-cut way. “Is the topic of ‘community’ or the topic of ‘performance’ more important to me? Or perhaps rather “loyalty”…? … and what if, of all things, my own values are not included in the canon of 112 values on offer?”.
In workshops in which we had previously discussed the respective significance for teams using the “value tables”, we came up with the idea of developing a playful and yet appropriately professional format. The phrase “I’m going to play my “seniority” card and make an announcement” was for me personally the beginning of actually creating a card game called “ValueParty” from the values and their respective explanations. A game – a literal card game with the name “ValueParty” was born.
Making cultural change visible: Creating value profiles
In many workshops with teams or the entire workforce at smaller companies, participants enjoyed this mixture of a playful approach and seriousness with which values could now be discussed.
We collected our first value profile in a mechanical engineering company with the help of playing cards and visualized it with spheres (see photo). In the beginning, however, we were not even aware of the comprehensive significance for shaping cultural change. This only came with time, as we started talking to more and more people about their culture.
With the ValueParty, which is now available as an app, people can create their value profile based on three questions:
- What is important to me personally at work?
- What values do we currently live by in our organization?
- What values will our organization need to be successful in the future?
Cumulatively, we then obtain a value profile of the organization or team that uses this ValueParty together.
Basically, these value profiles revealed little new to the participants. After all, they were their values… However, it was very helpful to no longer talk about something really important like cultural change in vague, general and very unspecific terms, but to be very specific.
In addition, the values previously presented in the company presentations – as they had once been proclaimed – were placed next to the value profile. Friction or harmony could be felt, and the teams were sure to have fruitful discussions afterwards.
Many things were similar, some could now only be captured more specifically. In some cases, it was clear that a desire, a claim was recognizable in the official representations.
This is where we encountered a key challenge: many companies had their values on paper, but these values were rarely reflected or even lived in everyday working life. There was a clear discrepancy between the “official” corporate values and what was actually practiced in the company. And even where there seemed to be agreement, it was very imprecise when it came to understanding what was actually meant by terms such as “team-oriented”, “fair” and “innovative”. Wherever we intervened in the workshops with employees and managers, it became diffuse, imprecise, sometimes even arbitrary: “What does this mean for our understanding of teamwork, leadership and the allocation of research funds? And how can we react if someone does not adhere to what we consider to be “fair” or “innovation-promoting”?”
As the berlin team, we wanted to eliminate this arbitrariness, this misunderstanding. And we wanted to enable the step from analysis to intervention, to action. We were looking for something that would allow us to move from the analysis of values to the critical issues and from these in turn to objectives and from there to measures.
With the existing deck of cards – a limited number of cards with limited choices – we had reached a limit: how could we ensure not just a “sentiment picture” but rather a “measurement” based on the basic idea of the Graves Value System?
Cultural change in the virtual space
The coronavirus pandemic initially seemed to us to be a knock-out for the further spread of the idea of being able to map existing values, moods and needs with a card game by avoiding physical encounters and hygiene regulations. But in the end, it led us to fully digitize the process of value-based business transformation.
Practical example: How cultural change works with the ValueParty
Interestingly, it was specific requests from larger clients that helped us to further develop the tool level: “What can we do to develop our corporate culture together at a time when we are almost exclusively stuck in web conferences? We read something about a “values-based corporate transformation” …. During a clarification meeting with the interested parties, it turned out that an innovation forge of a large infrastructure developer with 500 employees had grown considerably in recent years. Almost drunk with success, they had developed many new ways of doing things, old habits had been cut out and in this spirit and with this dynamism, they had achieved strikingly great business successes. Inquiries from the parent company as to what the secret of success was could usually only be answered with generalities by the board members of the innovation forge. Occasionally, it was heard at the company’s headquarters, even board members would be humiliated by project managers…
The company’s order books were full and the team was brimming with self-confidence. However, as the pandemic began to take hold, the majority of employees were working from home. Preparing for the upcoming projects seemed necessary, the desire to put their own qualities into a form was great: “How can we continue to preserve and develop the special qualities that have led us to such great success? What unites us, what are the qualities that we want to convey to new project managers and executives? What makes our culture successful?” The first impulse to ask a marketing agency to create a slick presentation, produce beautiful posters and funny mugs with imaginary cultural symbols was quickly shelved. “No, we want to cast the genuine, the real, what is really important to us, in a form that comes from us, that really reflects our values!” The magic word “values” had been spoken.
What kind of cultural change makes sense? What is a good corporate culture?
A good corporate culture suits the people who work in it. They feel comfortable with it. And it supports the organization in mastering current and future challenges. In other words, it makes the team or company fit for the future.
Today, we can measure both dimensions with the ValueParty, map them in the value profile and derive targeted measures for successful cultural change. But how did we get here?
The value profile in presence
Well, we had experience of celebrating a “value party” in face-to-face events, even with groups of up to 100 people. By exchanging ideas with each other and asking them to prioritize one by one, we succeeded in creating “the value statement”.
- What is important to me? What are my personal core values to present as a team result.
Two supplementary questions thus complete a “value statement”: - What are the dominant values in your organization (Orga-IST)? and the first question
- What are the desired or necessary values in the organization for the future (Orga-SOLL)?
While we had already managed to map team and cultural dynamics in person and thus make the core topics discussable, the question now was how the whole thing could be realized in a virtual environment.
Well, in times of need, ways are found; and ours were very practical and results-oriented. Two requests for cultural change during the corona period in organizations with 200 and 500 employees gave us the courage to find a quick solution for such a process:
The cards were placed digitally on a digital white board and each participant was able to copy/paste their personal “value statement”.
By allowing larger groups and parts of the company to create their value profile, we were able to quickly initiate in-depth discussions and processes about corporate values. In several companies during the pandemic, we succeeded in realigning the value compass in a purely virtual way and in a collaborative manner.
The question of how to get groups of people to make their “value statement” “on the computer” was the starting point for the development of our app and the method that we now call “value-based corporate transformation”.
Further information on the topic of corporate culture can be found here >>>
Practical example of cultural change: How the “ValueParty” works in reality
Let’s take a look at an example of a cultural change that we have accompanied:
A medium-sized company, part of a larger group, which was struggling with strong internal mistrust and declining employee motivation, decided to take a closer look at the causes. The mood was tense, management had become alienated from employees and the much-cited “worm” was definitely in the system. “Our corporate values testify to innovative strength, a sense of community, partnership and a shared pursuit of economic success. How can it be that we are blocking each other and that so much tension and mistrust characterize our cooperation?” pondered our contact person, the HR manager. After a two-hour presentation to the management, the works council and some employees, our method of looking at the value situation in the company, in the individual parts of the company with the ValueParty, was welcomed as a helpful way to start the cultural change.
The previous company values had been named by top management. In our view, it was no wonder that the employees could not identify with them. We therefore attached great importance to ensuring that all employees were able to participate in this process. Our “ambassador concept” ensured that everyone would have the opportunity not only to make their “statement”, but also to influence solution scenarios. The group of around 30 ambassadors were informed about the procedure in advance at a kick-off and encouraged to take a step together towards a new and authentic culture with shared values. After two weeks, the results of the survey were available – we shared the results of the survey in a “virtual value party”:
Without going into detail here, the ensuing discussions immediately led to the formation of working groups and the identification of the core causes of recognizable disruptions. Three weeks later, the entire “Value Compass” was completely redesigned in several working groups.
The new core values, the guidelines and the associated behaviors were worked out in workshops. The enthusiasm to do all this together and in a coordinated manner was extensive. Much later, screensavers of the new values were produced and external symbols for the new values compass were produced.
In a conversation a few weeks ago, the company’s CEO greeted me in a WebCo. Behind him, the results of the new core values could be seen in the background. We had only been in loose contact for a year and he reported on the successes of the cultural change, which can be felt and experienced practically in our daily interactions: “We are so successful that rumors are spreading in the parent company and among our customers that we have distributed a magic potion to our employees and our management… A completely new “mentality” seems to have spread among us”. In order to keep the process alive, we agreed to create the current value profile again next year.
For another client with a similar initial situation, we encountered major concerns from the management: “We realize that we have to do something… our corporate values, i.e. those that are visible on the website, do not match what we live and experience here every day… We imagine that the employees will respond to the ValueParty in such a way that the cohesion as a whole will be destroyed, that the employees and colleagues here will start a palace revolution with their ValueParty… completely unrealistic demands, badmouthing the management…” “Indeed,” we replied, “things may come to light that have not been discussed before. However, they were there before and have shown their effects. Only when they are allowed to be discussed openly is it possible to find solutions to them. And people are usually very constructive in the process of cultural change. If they sense that we are genuinely interested in them, employees tend to enter into dialog and look for feasible ways forward together.
And here too, the directional support that comes from asking the people in a company about what really matters to them – their values – was evident. There was real friction in the process that followed. Managers were open to questioning the extent to which their behavior was conducive to building and developing powerful teams. In the process of cultural change that followed, the managers were willing to work on themselves: They developed a new explicit leadership model and went through a development program together to learn the skills that were now required. The resulting cohesion at management level and the strengthened skills of the management team led to a new form of cooperation throughout the company. The effects of this became visible after around one and a half years.
The ValueParty app – finally truly digital and smart
Much had already been achieved with the skills developed during the pandemic to guide a value process and create easy-to-read value profiles from survey results. Counting the frequencies of the individual cards in the value statements, entering them into an Excel spreadsheet and then creating presentation graphics had been “backbreaking work”. The effort involved in turning this into an app was not particularly great. With our partners from codeharbour, a lean and easy-to-use tool was up and running after just a few months: our clients now fill out their “value statements” with the entire team in just 30 minutes. After solid preparation of the process, a large number of value-oriented processes have now been implemented. The smart thing is that we are now able to get larger groups talking to each other about what really matters to them very quickly and easily.
With the ValueParty app, each person receives their own value profile and can compare how their own gut feeling matches the overall profile created in the cultural change. Individual teams can also be evaluated and it is possible to discuss, for example, why sales assesses the situation differently to service, why accounting feels a lack of discipline but the other teams feel more pressure and how to deal with the fact that the entire team feels pressure on the subject of performance but the boss perceives a lack here.
The ValueParty app as a tool for cultural change
Models and tools exert a great fascination on us humans, especially when they work and produce results that seem useful to us. For this reason, I’m going to “put my foot on the ball”, as we often do in highly dynamic processes.
With Graves’ model and the elaborations by Beck/Cowan (Spiral Dynamics), the in-depth elaborations by Ken Wilber (more on this elsewhere) and finally the tool of the ValueParty App, we have created a powerful model basis and ultimately also a helpful tool as a prelude to a helpful cultural change. Here we can pause for a moment and rejoice.
Does this tool solve problems, does it provide us with insights that automatically support and drive transformation? This is, of course, a rhetorical question. Tools can be used, but they do not solve what is knotted or defective.
But in what context, in what specific situation and how can the results of a survey with the ValueParty app actually be helpful and what is required for this?
The question posed above: “What can we do if we are in trouble?” can now be answered. Working on symptoms or formulating detached corporate values with a lot of marketing effort does not lead to anything helpful. If we want to ignite and use the power of an organization with its employees, we need to identify the source of power and remove disruptions from the system. Far-reaching changes are not usually implemented as a “change” event – they represent a transformation in which as many of those affected as possible become participants.
We have described the concept of the ValueParty in detail in the book “Corporate culture as a success factor”:
The value party is therefore a transformation process in which an organization is put in a position to face the challenges of the future powerfully on the basis of its corporate values. With the measurement, we offer a qualitative and quantitative description of the individual values, the values lived in the organization and what is required and necessary to meet the challenges of the future.
With the process and based on the measurement with the ValueParty app, we give the organization a powerful lever.
Outlook: The next evolutionary stage: automation and new horizons
The successful launch of the ValueParty app marked a major milestone. However, as with any innovation, our quest for improvement does not stop here. A decisive step in further development is the automation of the entire process. What was originally carried out laboriously by hand – collecting the value statements, manually entering them into Excel tables and creating presentation graphics – has been greatly simplified and accelerated by the app. Today, the app is able to evaluate data in real time and present it in a visually appealing way. It offers a comprehensive analysis of actual and target values, uncovers contradictions and makes the deeper dynamics within a team or an entire organization visible. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are already integrated into our planning in order to make even more precise predictions about future value dynamics and potential areas of conflict. This enhancement will enable us and our clients to deal with change more proactively and take targeted measures to develop values.
The community is growing: a network for cultural change with the Graves Value System
In parallel to the technical development, we have focused on fostering the ValueParty community, people who want to drive or better understand cultural change with the help of the Graves Value System. One of the greatest strengths of our app is that it not only serves as a tool for individual organizations, but also enables exchange between different companies. Consultants, managers and teams from different industries can share their experiences, exchange best practices and learn from each other. In this way, a growing number of partners and customers have gathered around the ValueParty to actively promote our value vision. These “value networks” create a unique platform for exchanging ideas about change in corporate culture.
Annual events such as the ValueParty conference offer participants the opportunity to dive deep into the methodology around cultural change with the Graves Value System and see how other companies are using the app to achieve transformative success. The conference is not only a place for inspiration, but also a space where new ideas can emerge and be developed together. The ValueParty app and the underlying value transformation process have proven that they are more than just a tool for capturing corporate values – they are a catalyst for profound change. Our vision for the coming years is to integrate the app even more strongly into the day-to-day work of organizations and to establish it as an integral part of corporate development.
Looking to the future, we want to further develop the app so that it not only helps with analysis and diagnosis, but also with the continuous improvement of corporate culture through automated suggestions for concrete measures. This “intelligent” app will be able to make recommendations based on the value profiles on how teams can improve their collaboration, managers can adapt their behavior and companies can build sustainable cultures.
A look back – and forward
The path from the first cultural change workshops with physical value tables to today’s fully digitalized and smart ValueParty app was long and marked by many insights. What began as an experiment has developed into a central building block of value-based corporate management. The successes that our clients achieve through the consistent use of the app speak for themselves: companies not only grow economically, but also create a culture that sustainably strengthens the motivation and commitment of their employees.
The ValueParty app has revolutionized the way we talk and work about corporate values. And although we have already achieved a lot, this is just the beginning. Our journey continues, and we look forward to shaping the next generation of values-based transformation together with our partners and clients.
Are you planning a cultural change yourself? Or would you like to discuss another topic with us? We look forward to hearing from you!