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Orienting to Value

Blog: Tyner Blain

Orienting to value – every team, every person does it differently. How you orient to value limits how much value you can create. People with a naive orientation can only scratch the surface, cogs in someone else’s machine; those with a refined orientation to value, well, there is no limit to what they can do.

How Teams Orient to Value

Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to work with dozens of teams, helping them improve their ability to create value. All of these teams believe the work they are doing is valuable. How they think about the value of their work limits how valuable their work can be. How they orient to the value of work defines how they think about value.

How teams orient to value limits how much value the teams create.

Here at the start of this article, the above statement is only odd. I will repeat it at the end of the article, and if I’ve spoken to you, you will agree with me that this statement is also powerful. Keep reading, and let’s see how we do.

Every person on each team, and every person each team interacts with orients to value in a different way. Some orientations are weak while others are powerful. My job is to help improve what teams can do, and I use the word orient, instead of align, because how they align – how they orient is where we have to change. Alignment is not a good enough word to make the changes we need to make.

In researching messaging systems just after the turn of the 21st century, we discovered that the messaging systems people used were defined by the communities into which they entered. The same is true for value orientations. Individuals may arrive with a particular value orientation, but they cannot advance beyond (and are expected to match) the orientation present in an organization.

Teams form shared identities, defined by their repeated patterns of behavior. When teams see these labels, they immediately know which one best matches the systems, practices, and conversations they are having. When presented with all 5 labels, they may aspire to a different label.
I will discuss each identity from right to left – not because I’m being difficult, rather because it has other meanings. This orientation aligns to some key techniques which help teams do more valuable work. That alignment won’t be relevant in this article, but I appreciate the power of the spatial symmetry and thus is useful for teams who are doing the work.

Doers of Work

People who identify with doing the work measure themselves by (a) measuring how much time they spend working and (b) measuring the quality of the work product.  The quality reflections are limited to acceptance criteria – no splinters, no crashing bugs or spelling errors, a continuity of colors and tones.  The primary orientation is to the amount of time they spent working.

Some smells which tell me this is the likely thinking pattern in an organization:

Builders of Things

People who identify with building things measure themselves by (a) measuring how much work product they create and (b) measuring how quickly they produce their outputs and (c) measuring the quality of their work product.  The primary orientation is either on measuring throughput or on measuring cycle time.

Some signals which tell me this is the likely thinking pattern in an organization

Solvers of Problems

People who identify with the immediate purpose of why they are building things measure themselves by (a) assessing if whatever they built solved the problems their users needed to solve (b) measuring how many problems they solve and (c) measuring how quickly they can solve a given user’s problem. The primary measure is consistently on measuring throughput of solved problems.

Some signals which tell me this is the likely thinking pattern in an organization

Makers of Change

People who identify with the objectives of causing change through solving problems measure themselves by (a) determining if observable changes (improvements) result from the work they have done (b) measuring how much improvement was realized, (c) reconciling observable changes with predicted changes to improve future predictions.

Some signals which tell me this is the likely thinking pattern in an organization

Creators of Value

People who identify with the objectives of creating value for their company (while also creating value for their customers) measure themselves by (a) first determining if observable changes result from the work they have done and then measuring the benefits to the company resulting from those changes, and (b) reconciling observable changes and benefits with solution-hypotheses and outcome-hypotheses.

Some signals which tell me this is the likely thinking pattern in an organization

How Teams Orient to Value

As my friend Will Evans (@semanticwill) just wrote, the wrong orientation is worse than limiting, it can mean failure (or “death” as he puts it).

When the team’s perspective is too narrow, when they operate within unjustifiable constraints, when they are unaware of misalignment to actual (potential) value, they at best get lucky, and at worst fail. Take a moment to see where your team is oriented, and start working to get them to the next-better-orientation.

How teams orient to value limits how much value the teams create.

Helping them develop the increasingly robust and effective orientations to value, where their efforts and energies become less likely to be wasted on “the wrong work” – this is the rewarding work. And remember, you cannot simply declare a new orientation, you have to work with and through the organization around the team to make it possible for them to be effective with their improved orientation.

The post Orienting to Value first appeared on Tyner Blain.

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