About our Practice of Value Immersion

Back home in Hawai‘i on her college break, my beautiful, fun-loving niece Brookie posted this summertime photo on her Instagram…

Groovy Girl Summertime Dip

…and one of her friends commented, “Why are you in a blow up pool when you live on an island with an ocean 30 ft away?”

Look through Brookie’s full gallery, and you’ll see she spends a good amount of time in the warm waters of our ocean too. Point is, that Brookie has a range of different choices, and she chooses what she needs or wants at any given time.

That’s the way it works for our value immersion practice as well.

About our Ho‘ohana Community’s Practice of Value Immersion

To immerse yourself in your work, is to “involve oneself deeply in a particular activity or interest.” ‘Deeply’ however, can be a matter of varying degree.

We use the phrase “value immersion” for our current value studies because of the easily achieved benefit to be gained from simply telling ourselves what we’ll pay attention to during any given time, and choosing to actively do so.

We focus.
We fixate.
Often, we suddenly see connections between a value and our work that we might have missed seeing before. We decide to latch on better, and learn more. We might choose to tweak something, or we might choose to just leave it alone and move on.

We align, to bring to agreement, and to achieve better harmony in our work.
We align, so work is sensible, reasonable, and feels right to us.

That is the immersive experience I am wishing for you every two months, when I write a new essay for one of Managing with Aloha’s 19 Values of Aloha (as just done with ‘Ohana for July & August).

And it’s always your choice. Sink into it, taking better notice of what you now notice, or plunge in and wallow in it for a while. Dip into a shallow pool of immersion, and find it’s enough and just right, or take a swim in a larger ocean of possibilities and cast a wider net to explore more, and question more.

Our #AlohaIntentions keep us aware of at least 5 different value-verbing possibilities;

The great thing about value immersion, is that you don’t lose yourself in it —by the very nature of the values’ ethos, what actually happens, is that you will find more of yourself.

Let’s take a quick review of our value study vocabulary. This is a good place to review our Language of Intention, pertaining to what we do with values around here: Values are our ALOHA-packed value tools of choice:

Our Value Alignment Toolkit:

1. VALUE ALIGNMENT
Frames our key objective — To align the actual behaviors of a workplace culture with the values we say we believe in from an intellectual and convicted point of view: We believe in this value deeply, and therefore, this is what we consistently do, or aspire to do; this is how we will behave. Alignment is agreement, and value alignment agrees on both intention (why) and execution (how to, what to, where to, and who with).
[VALUE ALIGNMENT defined in the 9 Key Concepts, and as Key 3 category.]

2. VALUE MAPPING
Names the process [of VALUE ALIGNMENT] — We map out how we intend to achieve our objective, much in the same way we map out objectives like mission and vision, and all our strategic initiatives. Visualize a map: The values we select and work with, act as guide and compass.
[VALUE MAPPING tagged for learning.]

3. VALUE VERBING
Puts the process of VALUE MAPPING into the everyday language of workplace culture. We transform our VALUE ALIGNMENT intentions into executable actions via highly active, next-action verbs. We create our talk, so we can then walk that talk.
[VALUE VERBING tagged for learning. This is the post you will want to start with: Next-stepping and other Verbs.]

4. VALUE IMMERSION
Immersion means to go ‘all in.’ When you choose a value for your workplace culture, you align it completely — in everything you do. VALUE IMMERSION is flexible and adaptive when it has your constant attention: When confronting change, you realign and audit your value integrity in every strategic juncture. Remember: You can change your values too, growing them as your culture grows.
[VALUE IMMERSION is the primary objective of a Value of the Month program: Value Your Month for One — You.]

5. VALUE STEERING
VALUE STEERING is similar to VALUE MAPPING, but it is specific to project work, and refers to projects, pilot programs, and experimental initiatives. A value or pairing of values will be chosen to steer a project as primary value/conviction criteria: Those choices are the values which encapsulate the over-riding WHY a project is taken on to begin with, and they will do the steering necessary, as project work tends to wander — as it should, exploring and testing options, contingencies, and useful rabbit holes.
[In our storied history, ‘steering’ also refers to the Lesson of the Six Seats, found within chapter 9 of Managing with Aloha, on the value of KĀKOU.]

Jump in, for the water’s refreshing.

I know this seems like a lot. As with any language, it gets easy once you use it deliberately and consistently, as a toolbox. You a) talk the talk, so b) you can walk that talk. It actually becomes less, in that magic way that a language of intention will zoom as a culturally invented, and always reiterated-to-improve insiders’ shortcut. And believe me, this has gotten to be fun for the Alaka‘i Managers who deliberately and consistently are building a “with Aloha” culture of their own design.

Now stop reading, open up our toolbox, and go do something in your own value-aligned way. As always, reach out and let me know if I can help,

Rosa

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Preview the updates in Managing with Aloha, Second Edition, released July, 2016
Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawai‘i’s Universal Values to the Art of Business