Our Approach
Quantitative
EVS makes values relevant in several ways. Firstly, we've put numbers to personal values (yes, we've measured them), a notoriously difficult thing to do. Unlike most other values tools, EVS's values measure is not a consulting tool but a research method. With statistically reliable and valid research instruments, executives' values can be measured with rigour and confidence. So we can put values in the language of numbers, a world most practioners live in, so it helps make them real.
Click on the following link, to see more about the empirical research underpinning EVS's method.
But values are not about numbers. Values are about the interpretation of the numbers to gain insight into people's behaviour.
Framework
The second thing we do to make values real is use a simple research-based theory-driven framework. The framework is theory-driven and empirically based.
What we found in research is that executives' value systems are correlated with and driven by a theoretically predicted pattern of (changing) underlying needs, a first in a management context. In fact, EVS measured in a management context what marketers have observed for years: consumers' values fall into relatively predictable patterns that drive consumer behaviour too.
The framework backed up by research allows people to discover for themselves what it means for them. And discover that they are already experts in values. By virtue of being human you are already an expert in values, congratulations!
To understand how a policy, strategy or change initiative will affect the behaviour of people with X or Y values, one no longer has to ask, 'What are people with X or Y values like?', rather 'What part of myself do those X or Y represent?'
If it sounds too Californian for you or hippy-trippy it isn't, it's human nature. This is why people generally 'get it' relatively quickly and easily, because it is intuitive. We just don't know that we already know it. Values prove the proverb that you can't teach something that they don't already know. And it works at the individual, team, organisational and societal levels so you can understand the values dynamic with and between systems.
Click on the following link, if you want learn more about the theoretical underpinning of the EVS approach.