Ben and I were in a meeting room a few months ago amusing ourselves with a sign on the wall entitled, "Rules of Engagement for Meetings" - There’s an interesting presupposition in there about the dynamics of a meeting - I said, "I wonder what kind of meetings they have here?"

The third point on the list read, "All participants must demonstrate integrity." I think we would all agree that integrity is a good value for meetings and indeed any human interaction; but there’s an interesting problem that happens when we attempt to communicate or observe a value. For example, if someone were sitting with you right now demonstrating integrity, what would they be doing?

I’m sure you know what integrity means to you, but when you attempt to communicate it as a specific behaviour it becomes intangible. If you were to be able to specify it the behaviour becomes extremely surface-level and artificial - defeating the object of communicating at the level of values in the first place. Businesses recognise the importance of communicating values, and can sometimes be unaware that those values mean nothing until the individual attributes their own meaning to them.

We are currently delivering a model that puts values across in a way that the individual can attribute a personal, positive meaning to the value; and then experiment with applying that meaning to their role and then evaluating any positive new behaviours that it generates.