Robert explained that he had always been sub-consciously aware of the principles of being on-purpose within any project effort but the importance of performing value sync came during the late 1980’s when he’d inherited a project in crisis about part way through its planned duration. The project was critical for the organization and its shareholders, and he was assigned to manage the quality assurance team at that time. He found that the testers on the QA team were especially depressed and struggling with the demands of the development team. Upon close examination Robert noted that the ideas for success within the project effort were different for various members of the project team. There was a lot of pressure to hit some sort of release date and they also felt that the software was nowhere near ready for use.
“I see that as being revealing because actually, the ideas in the heads of all the different players were very different and they were really working towards dramatically different purposes and on dramatically different schedules of value”.
Indeed, the intent of the project effort was to demonstrate to shareholders that their capital investment could be turned into new, revenue generating technologies. Neither the testing team nor the developers involved had any knowledge of this purpose and thus the necessity for realigning values was obvious. The realignment involved all members of the team and its extended stakeholders; testers, developers, project management, sales, finance, and board level were involved. The effort of synchronizing values throughout those involved brought many members of the team back from a point close to quitting. Furthermore, by establishing a stronger understanding by all for the shared value each has in the project, the value sync spurred a heroic effort that brought the test team to the highest levels of recognition by the shareholders of the company. The QA team was applauded for ensuring the success of the project and the $2.3 million it generated in new equity.
This was and is ‘value sync’, an effort to align people’s expectations for the effort in hand. As Robert explains, “Once I knew what they really cared about, once they knew what we really cared about, and we were in sync about these things then we found fantastic solutions to problems which we’d never have dreamt of if we had just tried to solve them using tactical testing techniques.”
In his keynote at CopenhagenContext 2016, Robert will detail three different types of values and how those values may be revealed. He lists these as emphatic values, dynamic values and emergent values.
