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Defining
Personal Values/Common Values
How do we know, identify and define our own values?
How do we know, identify and define the commonly held values?
How do we objectively use values in making group decisions?
Personal Values
Your personal values define who you are and how you want to act in the world. The work that MAKE CHANGE NOW wants you to engage in is in no way about getting you adhere to any particular values or any specific definition of the values you hold. Your values are yours; only you can determine what values you hold, what label you use to identify them, or even what definition you give to that label. What MAKE CHANGE NOW hopes to do is develop your skills in identifying the values you hold, how to define or describe what that value means to you, and, ultimately, to use these skills to identify commonly held group values, define them collectively, and use the commonly held values to make decisions in groups.
Group Values
(aka commonly held values)
Whenever a group comes together, the individual members of that group bring with them the values they already hold inside them, whether they are consciously aware of them or not. Our values are like our DNA, our values are mostly the same. And yet, even with our DNA so similar, we are all uniquely different. Same with our values. Even though we might share the general label of a value like honesty or cooperation, what it means to each of us is different, sometimes just a little and sometimes quite significantly. This means our personally held values are uniquely ours even while we might share the general concept of the value with others.
What Does it mean to be Based on Values?
Most democratic decisions made in groups today use a process called Robert's Rules of Order (majority rule voting). This process is based on power; the majority has more power than the minority so the majority rules. This is certainly better for the people than one person, the king, having more power than everyone else or an oligarchy where a small number of people (think billionaires) have more power than everyone else.
In theory, everyone in a democracy has equal access to power, i.e., one person, one vote. However, in practice, we all know some people have more effective power than simply one vote. Today, we do not all have equal access to power. Democracy is still a vision for the future.
For a decision making process to be based on values, it needs to shift away from using power as the metric for what decides the decision. This shifts the entire process away from competition and towards cooperation, from manipulation and deceit towards transparency and truthfulness. But most important, rather than asking the question Who is in favor for or against the proposal?, the question becomes What is in the best interests of the group?. And how you determine if a proposal is in the best interest of the group is by already knowing what the commonly held (and defined) values of the group are, identifying the values inherent in the proposal and determining whether those values line up with or match the group's values.
MAKE CHANGE NOW wants to teach groups how to identify commonly held values and develop the skills of labeling and defining these values, whatever they are, for the purpose of making values-based decisions. The formal structure and process described in the book On Conflict and Consensus is a values-based process designed to interrupt the power that comes from privilege and dismantle the power that comes from using the techniques of oppression used in group discussions (think micro-aggressions).
If you decide to join this endeavor, MAKE CHANGE NOW intends to teach these skills experientially by bringing together 100 volunteers who, using the formal structure of Values-based Consensus, decide to do at least one action to make change now that everyone in the endeavor can accept and consent to doing. This includes forming affinity groups of like-minded individuals, setting up spokescouncils, learning how to be a facilitator and a spokesperson, and meeting skills like agenda planning, group discussion techniques and meeting process evaluations.