Creating Values

When I woke up , this morning and looked through the window , there was a beautiful spiderweb hanging across my window.It was a perfect work of interconnections , all tinny threads connected together and forming the system , with a important purpose for the spider:his home for catching what he need to survive.
It remembered me the beautifull weekend ,I passed together with our advisory team in the Belgian Ardennes. The purpose for the weekend was to elaborate on our values .

Values we have to have as a team , in order to collaborate and giving "the extra mile " to our customers.

I want to share our process we went through: systemic approach by using our left and right brain sides.

I have to say , that everything was systematic prepared :briefing on friday, sequency's of activities, timeshedule, etc
but the creation of the values has been  done by systemic thinking:

- Seeing the whole
- Interconnection of parts
- Team learning
- Shared vision
- Shared mental models
This included respect for each other, making time for each other, taking attention!

Our warming up excercise ,Contactpoint, from the Systems field Playbook of L.B.Sweeney and D.Meadows reinforced our teambuilding and unified our mental models , to come up with the most effective strategy.

As systemsthinking is looking at the whole ,considering that every person is a system on his own ,we have  captured  from each the personal values (initiated by present and past experience)and the values he believe necessary for the future.
Personal values are the values everybody get them from home, education ,social life....That what he believes in!
Future values are the values that each person believes ,is needed to give our customers a prime service.
The information we received was coming:
- from the participants: the values were expressed by using a personal object as metaphor
- from the absents: on-line information by e-mail

The next step was to to sort all this data , and looking for linkages between them . Therefore , we used again a excercise from the fieldbook , "postcards" where you learn to make a story from random distributed pôstcards.
With our linkage excercise , we gathered 36 values/beliefs which were at the same time important for each of us personally and important for collaboration and delivering the extra mile to our customers.

Our next step , was to upchunk our 36 values/beliefs to 9 important and critical values for the future.

To operate as a learning organisation, to communicate our values to our customers, to live our values and to maintain ownership, we made from each value a painting .
Visualisation is an important tool for systemsthinking, because it let you use your whole brain.
 
These painting will be hanged up in the office , used in publications , folders but more important .....they are the anchors for our beliefs.

Tired, but happy with the results, we driving home ........

Which experiences do you have ?