Across climate breakdown, democratic erosion, deepening inequality, and institutional distrust, changemakers are operating in conditions of heightened urgency and complexity. In these contexts, values are often treated as peripheral—reduced to aspirational statements that sit alongside strategy documents rather than actively shaping practice. Yet it is precisely under pressure that values matter most. They are not symbolic commitments. They are practical infrastructure for ethical, coherent, and sustainable social change.
Values as a Compass in Complex Systems
Social change rarely unfolds in linear or predictable ways. Changemakers routinely face uncertainty, incomplete information, and competing demands from funders, communities, partners, and institutions. In such conditions, technical rules and formal procedures quickly reach their limits.
Values function as a compass. They offer orientation when there is no single “correct” answer and help ensure consistency across decisions made by different people at different moments. Rather than prescribing solutions, values shape judgement. Without them, decision-making tends to become reactive or opportunistic, leading over time to inconsistency, mission drift, and erosion of trust—both internally and externally.
Beyond What We Do: Values and the How of Change
Most organisations can articulate what they do and why they exist. Far fewer can clearly explain how decisions are made when ethical tension arises. Values fill this gap.
They shape how power is exercised, how trade-offs are negotiated, and how success is defined beyond outputs and metrics. In doing so, values help translate good intentions into coherent practice. They ensure that the means of change do not quietly undermine the ends.
How Values Shape the Work We Take On
Values act as a filter for determining which forms of work are worth pursuing and which are not. They influence choices about partnerships, funding, scale, and speed—often in ways that challenge dominant logics of efficiency or growth.
For example, values centred on dignity, participation, or solidarity may lead an organisation to prioritise community-led processes over rapid expansion, invest time in listening rather than delivery alone, or decline funding that compromises autonomy or ethics. These decisions are rarely easy, particularly in resource-constrained environments, but they are essential for avoiding performative or extractive forms of impact.
Without this filtering function, social impact risks becoming disconnected from the values it claims to advance.
Values Inside Organisations: Culture, Care, and Power
Values do not only shape external work. They are equally important internally, where they influence organisational culture long before formal policies or governance structures do.
In practice, values shape how conflict is handled, how workload and wellbeing are treated, how mistakes are responded to, and how authority is exercised. When values are explicit and shared, people do not require constant oversight. Instead, they can ask a simple but powerful question: What is the most values-aligned choice here?
This creates trust and agency while reducing dependence on rigid hierarchies or personality-driven leadership. It also makes it possible to establish boundaries—saying no to behaviours or practices that undermine collective purpose, even when doing so is uncomfortable.
Values as Anchors in Times of Crisis
Moments of crisis place intense pressure on organisations to abandon principles in the name of speed, survival, or short-term success. In these moments, values function as anchors.
They do not eliminate tension, but they make it navigable. Values help prioritise what matters most when options are constrained and remind organisations who they are trying to be, not just what they are trying to achieve. Without this anchoring function, crises often become moments where integrity is quietly traded for expediency.
Values Must Be Practised, Not Just Proclaimed
Values only matter if they are enacted. When values are stated but not practised, cynicism grows and trust erodes. Practising values requires more than agreement; it requires ongoing reflection and collective accountability.
This means regularly asking difficult questions, such as:
- Where are we falling short of our stated principles?
- Whose voices are missing from our decisions?
- What behaviours are being rewarded, tolerated, or ignored?
Such reflection is uncomfortable but essential. It is how values remain alive rather than decorative.
How Values Relate to Vision, Mission, Strategy, and Culture
Values are often conflated with other organisational concepts, yet each plays a distinct role.
Vision describes the future an organisation is working toward. Mission clarifies the organisation’s role within that future. Values govern how decisions are made and relationships are formed. Strategy translates these elements into choices about what to do now. Culture emerges over time from the repeated, lived expression of values in everyday practice.
While vision and mission can be articulated relatively quickly, culture is built slowly. Values form the bridge between intention and behaviour, shaping what is rewarded, what is challenged, and what becomes normal.
Values as Infrastructure for Change
For changemakers working within volatile and contested systems, values are not a luxury. They are infrastructure.
They enable coherence across action, protect against ethical drift, and support ways of working that are both effective and humane. In an era where public trust is fragile and the costs of misalignment are high, values offer a means of translating intention into practice—and of ensuring that the work of change reflects the world we are trying to build.
