A free tool · Design for Social Impact Lab
Every organisation has values. Almost none of them cost anything.
The Values Framework — two frameworks, one for the work and one for lasting. Free, and yours to keep.
A value with no cost attached is a preference.
We have all sat in the away day where the values went up on the wall. Integrity. Community. Courage. Then we went back to our desks and signed off a budget with £0 on the line for paying the people the programme was built around.
That is not hypocrisy. It is what happens when values are written in a form that cannot be broken. If nothing about a value can be tested, and keeping it costs you nothing, it was never a commitment — it was a description of how you would like to be seen.
This framework is built the other way round. Every value you write carries two things with it: the test that tells you when you have broken it, and the price of keeping it.
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It asks for three things, not one.
Every value on the page carries a test and a price. That is the whole discipline.
The value
Written as something you do or refuse — not something you believe. “I do not…” is a good opening.
In practice
What it makes you do, or refuse, in a real working week. If it changes nothing on Monday, it is not yet a value.
What it costs
And who pays it. Named in the first person, with a number where you can. If nothing is paid, keep writing.
Who it is for
You are eight to fifteen years in. You know what equitable design looks like. You are usually the only person in your team who thinks about it this way, and you have learnt to translate yourself so fluently that you sometimes lose the original.
This is for putting the original back in writing.
Two frameworks, not one
Framework One is how I design — five rules for the work itself, with a starter bank so you are not staring at an empty box. I do not write a problem statement that locates the cause in people. I do not cost care at zero. I do not collect data I cannot say who owns.
Framework Two is how I last — what you will not absorb unpaid, the hours that are not available, who you tell when you hit the ceiling, what you do when the institution asks you to be the shock absorber again.
Most of us skip the second one. It is the one that decides whether we are still doing this work in three years.
Where this came from
These two frameworks close the Designing Otherwise Accelerator, where practitioners write them alone and then read one aloud to the room. Working it by yourself is a real version of the exercise. Parity pricing and bursaries are part of how the programme is built, and are offered without apology.
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Free. Includes Designing Otherwise, fortnightly. Unsubscribe whenever.
