 Almost 50 years ago, Robert Persig and his famous book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had something important to add to our understanding of systems change. When he wrote, if a factory is torn down, but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves. Mental models and the values that shape them are at the foundation of how we see the world and act upon it to create the environments we inhabit. To get a deep insight into the workings of the system we wish to change, we're going to have to map these out, visualize the values and beliefs of the different actors in the system. Each of us has a different set of ideas, aspirations, and perspectives on how to deal with the world around us. Our mental models contain information accumulated through our lived experiences. They determine our perception of new information and help us create new knowledge. A mental model explains an individual's reasoning, inferring, and decision-making process that influences their perception. Mental models reflect the beliefs, values, and assumptions that we hold, and they underlie our reasons for doing things the way we do. As Peter Senja's book, The Fifth Discipline, notes, mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures of images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. In any organization there are many individuals with an interest in such systems, the stakeholders, and each will hold a mental model of the system and its purpose, depending on their understanding, experience, values, and education. Interventions into a complex adaptive system should be informed by an understanding of the stakeholder's perspective. We need to be informed by a breadth of available experience. Lack of understanding to the different perspectives of the actors in the system can be one of the major stumbling blocks on the road to changing systems. Part of a change initiative will involve building a shared language around the problem. Languages express how we see the world. We can't build language without understanding a bit about how people see things. When operating in ecosystems of actors, it is important to realize that everyone has their different heritage, their journey to the present, and that that heritage frames and defines how they understand things and terminology. The same word can mean very different things to two different people because of their backgrounds. Without understanding the context within which a person uses a term, misunderstanding and conflict will arise. We need to understand where people are coming from before we can learn to speak a common language. Unfortunately, we cannot simply look at other people and discern their mental models. We need to make them explicit by mapping them out. Cognitive mapping is one way of doing this. Values are like a compass that directs our lives. They guide what we move towards or away from by defining what is of higher or lower value to us. Values rank what is good or bad, better or worse, and in so doing they give structure to our world. These rankings then work to motivate or demotivate us. Values are and probably always will be a major course of conflict in the world. Even when we may agree on a value, there will nearly always be some disagreement on the conditions that need to be met to fulfill the value. However, by learning how to elicit and work with values, we can begin to understand what is important to others and why they do what they do. In doing so, we can begin a process of mapping out the values of the people within the organization. Value mapping helps us answer why do people do what they do, by enabling us to describe the values which are embodied in our personal work and in a wider organization. These values are probably more important than anything else in shaping what we do. Our values might be something that we take for granted that we think is obvious, or that we've never actually articulated or written down. Revealing these values, however, can be very useful when trying to explain why things work the way they do. Once the values are mapped, they can be shared and act as a common reference point that simplifies and speeds up decision making. One good illustration of value mapping is the World Value Survey, a global research project that explores people's values and beliefs, how they change over time, and how those values affect their social and political reality. The global cultural map shows where societies are located along two dimensions. Moving upward on this map reflects the shift from traditional values to secular rational, while moving rightward reflects the shift from survival values to self-expression values. Values can be mapped in many ways. One of the most common is the hierarchy of needs that structures values in terms of their abstraction. People pursuing basic needs of food, security, or economic welfare will differ hugely in motivation and worldview to those pursuing more abstract motivation such as self-realization. Understanding the mix of different values and motives that drive and direct people's behavior is important to gaining a more comprehensive view of the system we are dealing with.