Exercise challenging your values

Continuing with Harvard’s Public Leadership Certificate’s “Leadership and Ethics” course, We performed an individual and a group exercise to interrogate and challenge our value system. It was a great exercise, chance for self reflection, group reflection, a moment of vulnerability in every certain world.

I loved the exercise so much that I modified it and repeated it with my family, close colleagues, and friends. It was a great shared moment. Having performed the exercise multiple times, I feel I am less vulnerable to share it publically now, so here it is.

Adding a breif description of the course to provide some context to the exercise. The course covers decision making and how our individual values and community values (norms), play into making decisions. One of the hightlights of the course is to acknowledge and rehearse that no value is lesser or greator than another value. Living a rich fullfilling life (Pride, acheivement, Respect), is as valuable as supporting someone else in need (Sanctity of life, Fairness, Equal Opportunity etc.)

The course differentiates a technical problem, with a adaptive challenge (moral solution, negotiation with values etc.). A technical solution (given the clear objectives) may be executed with expertise and may have one optimal answer, but for adaptive challenge, a leader should see what values are being interrogated in the challenge, which order of values the leader is using, and what other stakeholders are using, and how to come to consensus, or negotiate a solution. This brings the aspect of time as a tool for solution, where change may not be permitted now, but maybe within a couple of years, these moral values may shift based on experience and change can be attempted at that time.

Now for the exercise, To be honest to yourself, try completing one stage before reviewing the next stage. Start with an excel sheet with the following format.

If performing in a group setting, specify safe space norms, donot judge/mock values or experiences.
Share your written content with your after each step.

Completing the exercise with adequate self-reflection time can take upto an hour. Discussing with your group can take additional 30 minutes.

Step 1 – Listing your values

Identify atleast 4 Values you think are most important in your life and in order of importance,

For simplicity, Here is a list of values that others have used to consider for.

Accomplishment	Accountability	Accuracy	Achievement	Adaptability	Adventure
Aesthetics	Altruism	Ambition	Authenticity	Breaking Rules	Challenges
Co-creation	Collaboration	Community	Compassion	Competition	Connection
Contribution	Cooperative	Creativity	Curiosity	Decisiveness	Determination
Diversity	Drive	Ease	Efficiency	Equality	Excellence
Expertise	Exploration	Faith	Family	Farness	Financial Security
Freedom	Giving	Global view	Gratitude	Growth	Hard work
Harmony	Health	Helping others	Honesty	Humble	Humility
Independence	Influence	Innovation	Integrity	Intellectualism	Intelligence
Interdependence	Justice	Kindness	Leadership	Learning	Loyalty
Mentoring	Non-conformity	Novelty	Open-mindedness	Order	Passion
Peace	Perseverance	Preserving our environment	Privacy	Productivity	Professionalism
Providing for others	Quality Time	Respect	Responsibility	Self Direction	Self Reliance
Self Respect	Social Responsibility	Spirituality/Faith	Stability	Status	Success
Tolerance	Tradition	Wisdom

Sample Values

Step 2 – Defining your values

For each value, try to expand your value in your own words, eg. Self Sufficiency can be expanded as “Everyone should be empowered to live a happy decent life, i.e. Equality of opportunity”. Do this for all values before moving on.

Step 3 – How I “live my value”?

For each value, try to give very specific example on how you live it in your life or aspire to live in your life. Eg. for Self Sufficiency, I added

“Trying to ensure everyone has access to things needed and challenge the structures that disempower others.” (Concrete example omitted for public, but try to add concrete example for each value)

Step 4- Why is this value important to me?

This is one of the first stage of vulnerability, try to think back why this value became important to you. This can be a past event, that bothered you and you felt you will never let this happen again, or a person/place that inspired you and you made concrete decision to act more like this. Eg. for Self Sufficiency, I added

“Strong fear of rejection, focusing on self sufficiency to never ask and feel rejected. My past attempts at moonshots getting rejected, feeling potential rejection from God, rejection from people pushed me to never feel the need to ask for help, and ensure Self-Sufficiency.” (concrete example omitted from public, but try to add concrete example for each value)

Step 5 – List events in the past period that really made you happy/proud to be you. (list 4-8)?

Think of events in the past period (1month to 1 year) in which you were really happy to be you. These can include or exclude your current values that you listed in step 1. This step allows for honest interrogation of self. For example in the past 2 years I added events like: “Participating in peace protest (specific details removed for public), Celebrating birthday of someone (specific details removed), etc.

Step 6 – List other values based on your Section 5 events.

One of the things we discover in Step 5, is our initial list in Step 1 might be my public values, but Step 5 allows us to evaluate private values. This reflection allowed me to list values like “making others happy”, “being respected by others”, etc. One of the goals of this exercise was to acknowledge these values are important to people including ourselves, and stepping on those values for greator good is not the best option to resolve issues.

Then repeat the remaining columns (Step 2-4), for these private values and try to list why these became important to us.

Step 7 – Write small section on your imperfect self, when you weren’t able to live up to your values.

This step is important to acknowledge limited control we have on ours and others life. It helps to ground us in our own limitation, differentiate between moral opportunity and moral responsibility. More opportunity should not make us feel bad about ourselves that we didn’t live up to our values. Here is my paragraph on the same.

The readings on Superhero Philosophy, “With great power comes great responsibility”, deeply resonated with me. I have grand narratives for myself, using the intellectual and economic competence gifted to me as my source of power, and need (or moral responsibility), to use it in all instances of opportunities.

As a person born in Saudi Arabia (a developed nation), then moving to India (Developing nation), and now to US (Developed nation), I feel strongly empowered to make actual change in lives of others. My background in Software Engineering, and Economics and Development Policy, compels me to use my position in US, and in Massachusetts to generate biggest impact possible.

However, my actions to actually impact lives has not yeilded anything concrete.

The reducing rights of Muslims in India, and the one-sided war in Gaza impacted me deeply, as I felt empowered as a citizen to go and protest, but powerless to make actual change. I can obviously do much more, not stay at home/sleep/watch movies, and actual go out, write letters to Congress/Senate, send emails, but I don’t do everything I can. I feel laziness, lack of motivation and the sheer challenge as exhausting to even begin.

What next?

The course helped ground me in realities and limitations of real life, and I felt this encouraged me to take time, introspect what the stake holders feel about a problem and revisit the negiotiation from their view point.

Introspect my own biases in pushing importance of one value over other, even though the value may not be most important for the problem we are trying to solve. In the next article, I’ll share the change of narrative to solving the Greator Boston Affordable Housing issue before and after the Moral leadership exercise.

Stay tuned !