Value is a Social Object

In Agile thinking we talk about value to the customer.  In Lean we talk about a task's value to the achievement of a goal. A $1500 laptop on sale for $800 is a good value.  I value your opinion.  We have certain values that we use as reasons to vote or not vote for people.

Human beings are drowning in the need for value.  On the other hand, value is a moving target.  Value is entirely perception.

Will the customer want something with this feature? Yes.  Then it has value.  Seems concrete?  In 1977, you wanted an 8 track tape player in your car.  It had value.  Now it is worthless.

In 1997, you wanted a modem in your computer.  I have never even touched the modem in my current laptop and the other day was amused to notice it was even there.

Similarly, value transcends the individual.  Most organizations have a complex soup of value definitions to swim in.  Let's take your average layered organization and move along some potential value descriptions.

Individual Contributor (FTE) - value is derived from

• job security (will I keep my job?),
• job specificity (am I comfortable in my role?),
• contribution (do I help get things done?),
• acceptance (do my coworkers like me?),
• promotion (when do I move on up the ladder?),
• compensation (am I being taken advantage of?), and
• creativity (does my job make things better?).

Individual Contributor (Contract or Consultant) -

• contract security (will I keep my job?),
• rationale (why did they bring me in?),
• contribution (do I help get things done?),
• compensation (am I being taken advantage of?), and
• creativity (does my job make things better?).

Project Manager / Middle Management -

• positional boundaries (how much control do I actually have?),
• trust below (are the people I'm managing capable? do some of them want my job?),
• trust above (are my bosses happy? what do they really want? are they going to derail my decisions?),
• job specificity (am I comfortable in my role?),
• contribution (do I help get things done?),
• promotion (when do I move on up the ladder?), and
• compensation (am I being taken advantage of?).

C-Levels -

• trust below (what the hell are people in this company actually doing?)
• trust above (when is the next shoe going to drop from the CEO or the board of directors?)
• information (please tell me what is going on)
• direction (are things adhering to the vision?)
• corporate health (can we stay in business? have we satisfied our legal and social obligations?)

CEO / Board of Directors -

• vision (is the company internally coherent?),
• branding (is the company perceived as coherent?),
• credit worthiness (can the company ride a storm?),
• progress (is the company developing new things? is it innovative? is there growth?)
• image (is the company seen as being "good"?)
• cohesion (are the people in the company in alignment with the board's goals?)

I specifically kept these high level because I think that most specific value needs I've seen relate to these bullets.  But, value needs are social objects.

A social object is an artifact that is created, given meaning and can be exchanged or shared.

In this case, value needs of individuals are created naturally by people involved.  Teams, Divisions, Corporations ... all react to these value needs.

Much of the changes or successes attributed to Jack Welch weren't done by Jack Welch - they were done by hard working people in GE who were given freedoms to explore.  In other words, Jack Welch's greatest contribution was that he made it safe within the culture to discuss and exchange value needs.

Social objects imply a social contract.

If I imbue an object with meaning, that has no social weight.  I have a stuffed tiger at home that I have had since I was 3.  That has value and meaning for me - but very little impact on you.

However, if I brought it to the office, while you might think it was a little weird for a 42 year old man to bring a stuffed one-eyed tiger to the office, you would understand its value to me and, unless you were a total jerk, would respect its value.  You wouldn't set it on fire, for example.

At that point, where we mutually understand the value of a thing or idea (even if we don't share in it) we have a social contract.

In a corporate setting, this is unbelievably important.

Navigating multiple value needs

Assume for a moment you are a group leader.  You need to motivate those under you, assure those above you, placate your peers, meet customer needs and achieve your own goals.  That's a huge array of potentially conflicting value needs.

When items come up for work in a given week, how do you get your staff fired up to do a good job?  How do you ensure that status information is expressed back to you in a coherent and timely way?  How do you ensure your "overlords" that everything is going well without just saying it? 

The most effective way is figuring out what is important to all those people and communicating to them in those terms.  In other words, you figure out their value needs and describe how what is being done now meets them.

This has an impact on how you select work.  Say you have a weekly meeting with your boss, but a bi-weekly meeting with a higher committee.  Weekly, you choose work to focus on your boss' value needs while maintaining enough work of value to the committee that is completed bi-weekly.

Oddly enough, quite often these aren't too far out of alignment.  It becomes a communication job.  However, at the same time, you will be organizing your work into more coherent chunks.  At the end of each chunk of time, you have a product for the proper customers.  This may be what you were doing all along, but just communicated differently or it may be a whole new way of programming.

It may seem like you are merely playing up to the boss, but your staff has value needs too.  Your work can't entirely be upward focused.

Doing this, your work will be coherent to a group of people and often meeting that minimum standard will be enough for other groups.  "This week we focused on doing these five things because they were really important to the CFO, they are done now."  A politically unassailable statement, generally.

Value Feels Good

Value just feels good.  It is the currency of cooperation.  Cooperation is implied respect.  When you value something, someone notices, and works to make it happen, you feel good.  When you are successful at providing it, you also feel good.

Value expression is the realization of a non-zero sum game that strengthens the organization.  People's needs are met and they respond in kind.  Free riders in a non-zero environment are easily identifiable because value isn't provided. 

Go out today and trade in some value.  See what happens.

Technorati Tags: modus cooperandi, value, non-zero sum games, game theory, zero sum, cooperation, collaboration, management

Comments

[Edward Vielmetti]

Jim -

I'm missing one piece of the set of questions you are asking here, which is (at all levels) "am I working on an important problem?", for whatever value of important is relevant to you.

[Jay Fienberg]

This is a really interesting set of ideas, but I had a little trouble following the jump from your discussion of value to your discussion of social objects to your discussion of communication / group dynamics around value.

Mostly, I think you're covering three very important, pretty big, related ideas and how they relate. But, each discussion is, itself, very important, and you've really packed a lot into this blog post!