 OK, so today I would like to talk to you about how you can take the values that are already in your heart and your head and make them part of your work and how that can make your work better. So all of us have value systems that guide how we behave in the world. And they may be consciously chosen or unconscious values from our upbringing and our surroundings. And groups of people aren't any different, even if a larger organization has formal values or a formal mission. Informal values bubble up in a group of people who work together. Let's see if I can figure out. No. How do I make the notes smaller because I can't read them? There we go. Yes, there. OK, sorry, my bad. All right, so when you don't talk about your values, you can't know if they're what you all really want together. None of these people are talking about what they care about. And you can't tell if you're being true to them. And when you do talk about your values, you can make better decisions and help others understand your choices. So I want to share some ideas about uncovering, setting, and communicating your values. So but before I go on, my name is Elaine Nelson. And I work at the Evergreen State College. You may know us from such stereotypes as the hippie college or the hipster college. Or there was a piece earlier about nirvana and the birth of grunge and how that was in our norms. And I work on a small team of web folks. I wrangle back end code and words. Justin pictured here. Wrangles front end code and pictures. And if anything about this presentation looks awesome, it's because Justin worked on it. And Susan wrangles projects and people. And together we make Evergreen's public-facing website. So we went through a process a lot like this when I'm going to talk about about two and a half years ago. And we came up with these four core values. So user-focused, data-driven, simplified, and iterative. And so where did they come from? How did we decide? Why did we even bother with something like this? So the college, of course, has a mission statement. And it has principles. And it has all of these big fancy words, none of which are here. And if you work for an organization that's been around for a while, you probably have plenty of fancy words to choose from. But that wasn't what we were looking for. We were just trying to find some ways to manage our overwhelming to-do list. So we held a retreat. And retreat, we found a room that had comfortable places to sit and lots of whiteboards. And we picked a time of year when there weren't a lot of people around. So a college in between Christmas and New Year's, great. And what we meant to talk about was the next few months of work, what we were going to actually do. But we ended up talking about why we wanted to do things, what we would use to make decisions, and to explain them. We did this super by accident, totally ad hoc, but you don't have to. But that is a great place to start. So gather a small group of people who work on projects together. And find a place without mundane interruptions. And start talking. And then keep talking, even after you're done with your little retreat. We started with at least a half a dozen values, lots of nouns and adjectives. And realized that some of them didn't match. And some of them were duplicates. And so we narrowed it down to ones we could all say without even looking them up. And when we looked back at the whole process, we came up with some questions that you might want to consider as you work out your team's values. And here they are. Here are these ideas. So the first one I think of is the zero step. So what do you care about most in the work that you do? And then the other questions help the team bring together your personal values with what your work needs to be doing. So what will help the organization achieve its goals? What can you learn from things that went wrong? And what motivates your boss? So first of all, what do you value? And personally, I, whoa, that's a microphone. Hi. I care about using a certain amount of scientific thinking in my work. And that means that I want to have reasons for doing what we do. And I want to be able to experiment with things. And I also value making sites that are designed and written for real people who are complicated. Susan cares that users can do what they're there to do. She craves consistency and simplicity. And she wants her work to be sustainable over the long run. And her frequent quote, if it's better than what we've got now, then go. Justin wants design to get out of people's way to be invisible. But he also wants his work to be unique and fashionable. And so we talked about all of those things. But we also have a common belief in trying and learning. So being iterative underlies almost everything we do. So I'm missing some notes here. Hi. Oh, right. So if your team's core values reflect those things that you all share, then you feel them as your own. They're not something that's imposed from on high. And so now that you've got that sense of yourself and your team members, you look outwards to what else is around you. And we came up, this was very much a collaborative process coming up with this presentation, some examples of other organizations, and some guesses that we made about what they value based on what we see of them. So you're asking, the next thing you might ask as you establish your core values is, what will help your organization achieve its goals? And so one of our inspirations has been the World Wide Web Consortium's Priority of Constituencies. And in fact, looking at the Priority of Constituencies was part of how we started talking about our core values. So who comes out on top when there's a conflict? Because in an organization that has many different stakeholders with conflicting goals and interests, they need something like this to give structure to decision making. Because they've put end users ahead of everything and theory after everything, we can guess at a value of utility, usefulness, standing behind that system. So oh, this has lots of extra animation that I didn't know about. Cool. So I'm just going to run through it because it's not critical to this. Oh, it's super slow. You can, for a commercial site like Hotel Tonight, we can see at least one of their values in their design, speed. You can see from the number of clicks from home to book that they care deeply about how quickly you can book a room. So that matches their business goal of getting just getting a person to a hotel room right now versus building a relationship or thinking ahead. So that's speed. Being user-focused and choosing the prospective student as our site's primary audience connects our decisions to the need of the college. Every piece of content has its user, and for our site as a whole, the most critical user is the prospective student. And so that connects our wish that the people be able to do what they want to do with the need of the college to recruit and retain students. So other values that might arise from this question could be actually found in those fancy words that nobody usually reads. What is your organization's mission or strategic plan? And which of those aspects speaks to your team and its daily work? If you don't have a larger organization's goals to connect to, what does your work need to do to be successful? So next, what can you learn from past mistakes? Before Wizards of the Coast, switching Dungeons and Dragons to a rule set with too much focus on grid combat and not enough character detail, open them up to competition on both the detail side and on the story side of role-playing games. The introduction of a new addition shows a rededication to a value of fidelity, rediscovering a field that entices back longtime players. While they may not say with words that they went in the wrong direction, the changes speak for themselves. So fidelity creates a streamlined game that new players can learn and old fans can love. So on our team, we've all three of us dealt with overly complicated systems and useless duplication, both at the college and in our previous work lives. So simplifying is a core value for us because none of us want to make that mistake again. I love this picture I spent in the morning searching for Rube Goldberg machines. They're fun. You might look to mistakes in your past and your organization's past and come up with values like respect, honesty, diversity, dependability. What did you do wrong? Don't do that again. And finally, what motivates your boss? By this, we don't mean pandering to them. We mean it knowing what their values are in the same way that you know the rest of your team's values and find the common points. So that connection makes it easier for them to become an advocate for you when you're not there. And by a boss, that can mean whoever is next up the chain that wasn't in the room when you were all talking. So it might be a senior manager, a VP, member of a board of directors. So, and it could be that attention to craft is something that your boss cares about. For the chain mail makers and other creators who are part of the Lord of the Rings movies, dedication to craft was a shared value from the tiniest link of rubber to the arrangements of fast armies. So we get craft. Without giving away too much, we do work with people for whom numbers are particularly persuasive. So we too are fans of data, so being data-driven was an obvious core value. You don't necessarily figure out what your boss's values are by asking them outright. You listen to their complaints and their compliments. You watch other people try to convince them and then see which arguments work. When you know what values you share, you can integrate those into your team. And so now you have your core values. As a team, you've all decided on them, and this is where you use them to filter your decisions and to have meaningful guidance under pressure. So I have a few examples for each of our team's values. When we redesigned our primary navigation, we didn't wanna hide links behind a hamburger menu, so there were only room for five things. But of course, everyone wants to be included, so we had to have a way to prioritize. When we looked at our old list of links and we asked questions about it, but not questions like, should this link be in the primary nav? Does it this link contain good content? Will a client be mad at us if we take their link out? Whoa, hold on. So those are ones that focus on the product or the needs of the content owners. They're not about the students. The kinds of questions we did ask, whoa, I went too far back. There we go. Does, do prospective students need this information? If not, who needs it? And how could that change its placement? And does our audience need info that's not currently available? And so those are focused on the user, not the product, the author, or the organization. And so in being user focused, we were able to more efficiently prioritize this massive amount of content and all of these content changes that we get on a daily basis. So when somebody approaches us about putting a link on the homepage, they have to concede that the needs of the prospective students, the user, outweigh their personal convenience, their ego, or some tiny slice of the site's audience. So that's one way we demonstrated. So here's another example. All of these content changes that write a new tagline, it turned into a committee debate, which is always terrible. And a bunch of ideas got thrown out there and it almost came to a vote, which is even worse than a committee. And so I suggested, well, actually Justin suggested, trying a split test to see how actual audiences would respond to the taglines, which of them would get more clicks? The one that was written by a marketing professional or the one that was written by the highest paid person in the room or which one? And so the marketing professional is the one at the top and everything else did quite a bit worse. And so the lesson, I guess, is to trust the professional but then verify. So we look to the data when we're unsure of the answers and the data can provide valuable insights into how well we're doing or where we could do better. And prospective students found the message compelling so we're tying our core values back to what brings value to the school as a whole. So earlier I mentioned how simplifying was a core value that came from past mistakes. So when prospective students come to a college website, they wanna know really quickly, what can I study? How much does it cost? How do I apply to it? And this information was scattered all over our site. Sometimes it was hidden. Can you get there from here? No. Sometimes it was duplicated and it didn't match up. And then there was a separate admission site that had its own navigation system and everything was out of date. No, that's not the right link. And so we were making it super confusing, still super confusing for people to get their most basic goals met. So it was clear that we needed to simplify and we needed the site to stay simple over the long haul. So that was part of how we got to that core value. And so we found and consolidated all of these duplicate pieces of content and we removed things that made it more confusing and we made it clearer, we scheduled audits. And every time we simplify something, our users respond positively and when we do usability tests, people find things more easily. And then content owners find themselves having to do less work to keep their site up to date, which means they can focus on other things that they need to be doing. And finally, oh, yes, this. So an earlier team spent two years in a vacuum. This is iterate, an example of how we needed to iterate. It had spent two years creating this fancy, fancy admission site that had all these crazy sliders and when they launched it, it was two years behind all the design trends and it had taken so long to get out the door that it even wasn't what was needed and it had left behind the rest of the site without a plan to bring everything together. Well, it was better than what was there before. It made, this is me, it made learning about the college really hard for the audience we were trying to serve. There we go, nope. So for our next big update, we decided we weren't going to just keep it locked away in a tower with like, we were going to do it iteratively. So putting out little bits of a new site a little bit at a time. And so this is kind of an example of one of those pages. This is how it started. And then we're like, oh, let's tweak this piece and then let's tweak this piece. And so that happened gradually over time and we can continue to keep iterating and it makes it better. So we were able to get in fresh new pages in front of prospective students without worrying about it. And we could come back to things later because we had a bigger plan of how we were going to iterate. So that brings me to the last step, and I don't remember, which is communicating those core values. You have them on your team, you're doing them in practice, but you have to tell other people what they are too. And we gave several versions of a presentation about our work on the website that was kind of about the website, but it always included our core values and explained how they influenced our decisions. By presenting this to other staff, we made the process more clear to them and the openness built understanding and respect. And we also rounded up some guinea pigs so we could keep trying things. We invited a few of our clients whose sites were essential for recruiting prospective students. Some of them already trusted us and some of them we expected to be a little bit more pushback. But the temptation of getting in on the ground floor of a redesign was a great way to get some of them on board. And we made it clear that not everything was gonna go smoothly at first. So we tried things out on them. We iterated our values and our process on them together with them knowing what would happen and that created a portfolio of success stories. And the communication and the demonstration works hand in hand. The more we showed how our values worked, the easier it's been to get people to understand how our process works. By showing our wins to the senior staff and explaining the reasons why they worked, we've built trust and turned them into advocates for us. So we had VPs who were being our advocates. Our process for establishing victories and filters down to the staff and the base of advocates grows. And that means we get less angry emails in our inbox when big changes happen. And this bedrock is, this process is the bedrock for our success. We go back to it time and time again when we're approached about a change that we don't know how to handle. Like the email that you get that you start writing two sentences and then you just wanna start yelling at everybody, we know what our values are and we can ask ourselves how this thing that we're dealing with stacks up against our core values and make a decision from there. It's a big point of pride for us to be able to do that. And so we ask, is this good for the user? Will this get good results? Can we test it to see if it works? Is it just the right information? Does it make things more simple? And is it better than what we already have? Putting the core values into action won't stop someone from getting mad at you, but it creates a good starting point for dialogue. It's a conversation. And I love this slide. I didn't make this slide, but I love this slide. Are you gonna be the one who tells Captain America guinea pig that his values are wrong? Because with your val... Okay, let's just go back and appreciate Captain America guinea pig for a second. So with your values in place, you can better do your job. Unifies your direction, it supports your strategy. You have better relationships with your coworkers and you feel like you're being true to yourself. So determining the core values will help surface what's important to the team and you've seen some strategies about that. Demonstrating them will allow you to work with more integrity and show your coworkers how the core values inform your strategy and communications will set the expectations and bring more people over to your camp. So thank you so much for listening. You can find me on Twitter at E-Personae and on my blog at aleynelson.org. Thank you. Thank you.