WHAT WE DO
We help organisations work with and through values.
We facilitate, train, consult, develop resources, and assist with planning. Values work can involve other organisational issues such as change, strategy, and identity. Our process can include developing a brief, gathering data, implementation, and evaluation, depending on your requirements.
Examples of what we do include:
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Helping organisations identify and articulate their values
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Designing and facilitating sessions that explore the meaning of values and how they affect the organisation and its work
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Guiding leaders in developing their role as values promoters
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Developing resources to help in working with values
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Working with managers to ensure that strategies and values are aligned
OUR APPROACH
We believe values-work should be:
RELATIONAL
Values work should be developed with relevant stakeholders, not done to others.
Where possible we use participatory methods to build lasting consensus, motivation, and capacity for change.
Each relationship is unique, and they all take time, so we tailor our support to your needs as your values work develops.
CREDIBLE
Espoused values are aspirations that orientate and motivate, not rules that are fulfilled or broken.
Organisational members - especially leaders - should make credible and committed efforts to enact their values, learning from failures along the way.
Nobody can entirely live up to every interpretation of espoused values, but it matters that we try.
EFFECTIVE
Values work should make a positive difference, even if that's sometimes hard to measure.
Your organisation might seek to pursue sustainability, deliver high-quality services, or promote equality and inclusion. Values can help you articulate what you want to achieve and how you want to do it.
We do not promote inauthentic values work such as ‘greenwashing’ or ‘corporate spin’.
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HEALTHY
Different people’s psychological responses to values-based promises and activities will differ.
Healthy values work accommodates that diversity, resisting the tendency towards using values as a form of control.
Those who question, resist, and even feel cynical towards organisational values can make important contributions, so we try to include them in our work.
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INFORMED
Our work is grounded in academic research and practical experience.
We draw on ideas and approaches from psychology, management, and organisation studies to inform and illuminate aspirations and issues pertinent to your values work.
WHY VALUES?
Values underpin strategies.
Values underpin processes and procedures.
Values underpin behaviours.
Your organisation, and groups within it, will naturally evolve shared values over time. By actively engaging in values work, you can bring these to the surface and examine them, enabling you to accept or adapt them in line with your objectives. Communicating values inside and outside your organisation sets expectations and helps stakeholders to identify with you.
OUR DIFFERENCE:
academic expertise and practical skills
We've been generating and studying internationally-recognised research on organisational values for more than 15 years, and we combine this with expertise in psychology.
In addition, we have a history of hands-on organizational development, project oversight, and leadership. We’re good at communicating complex concepts to a range of audiences. And we use our training, facilitation, and participatory research skills to get people involved in processes that affect them.
This blend of expertise and skill enables us to offer high-quality organisational development support.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
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Bourne, H., & Jenkins, M. (2013). Organizational Values: A Dynamic Perspective. Organization Studies, 34, 495–514.
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Bourne, H., Jenkins, M., & Parry, E. (2019). Mapping Espoused Organizational Values. Journal of Business Ethics, 159, 133–148.
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Lee, Z., & Bourne, H. (2017). Managing Dual Identities in Nonprofit Rebranding: An Exploratory Study. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 46, 794–816.
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Sanderson, Z. (2021). Idealism, Disillusionment, and Cynicism in Response to Values (In)Congruences in U.K. Nonprofit Organizations: An Exploratory Study. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 50, 1150–1169.
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We would be happy to send copies of these, and any other, published works.
ABOUT US
Humphrey Bourne held sales and management positions in industry before embarking on an academic career. He has an MBA from Bayes Business School (formerly Cass) and a PhD from Cranfield School of Management. His doctoral research was on the relationship between personal and organisational values and since then he has continued to study values in organisations, extending his interest to organisational identity and strategy.
Zoe Sanderson managed and developed social enterprises and charities for several years, specialising in helping organisations to articulate the ethos and impact of their work, before moving into public sector policy development work and then into academia. She has an MA from the University of Cambridge and an MSc in Occupational Psychology. Her current doctoral research collaboratively develops alternative ways of conducting research in work and organisational psychology.