About Values
The Kairios Values Perspectives model and practice is comprehensive and depthful.
Here are some resources for understanding how values work, and how to work with values.
Values Perspectives is a twofold approach, supported by an online values survey. It looks, in a non-judgmental way, at both your highest-priority values–your real values–and at the worldview-lens that colors how you interpret your values, and the values of others around you.
What’s Important: Understanding and Working with Values Perspectives
The Kairios Values Perspectives Model
We each hold a set of several values that are most important to us. They make us who we are—whether we are consciously aware of them or not. We know that values work in combinations or clusters that make us each unique in our values worldview. We have found it useful to work with six values “perspectives:” groups of values that tend to cluster around the most basic lens that people use to make sense of the world. We each tend to relate naturally to one or two of these perspectives, and we tend to define any value we hold, for example Honesty, using the lens of our most energized perspective. At the same time, each of us has access to all of these perspectives, giving us the potential to choose when a value is most important, and to understand the values of others. More about how values work…
Watch for the upcoming expanded 2nd edition of What’s Important
What’s Important is about Values Perspectives: a different way of looking at and working with values, whether you want to really understand what drives your own life and work choices; or if you want to build a foundation of shared values energy with your team, or, align your organization behind a truly shared sense of purpose. This book is about why and how values matter. What’s Important is also a practical handbook for the coach, counselor, teacher, internal or external consultant and change agent who knows that values are our deepest drivers, and that values can unlock immense potential for self-awareness, communication, influence and positive group energy, when we know how.
Resources from The Observatoire des Valeurs
The Observatoire des Valeurs is an aggregator of values research and practice based in France, and is an esteemed partner in values development. Check out its many valuable resources here.
More Resources
The world of work is shifting dramatically, and more than ever, people are leaving unsatisfying jobs. People are looking for work with values. Find out how to present your values to a prospective employer, and how to discern what that company’s values really are. Includes an interviewing guide. Download the PDF.
NEW 2022
In Chap. 9, “Inclusive Leadership in a Creatively Compelling World,” Ginger Grant and Cheryl De Ciantis describe and elaborate on five areas of unprecedented opportunity: embracing change as imperative while committing to creating nodes of needed stability; putting people first by prioritizing the value of empathy and getting real about issues of power regarding who gets what and why; commitment to values by “walking the talk”; making it real by ensuring all stakeholders have a place at the table; and re-mything ourselves: using every avenue available to us – from science to the arts – to re-create the narratives that valorize the truths we wish to live as humans within an interconnected web of existence.
Artificial intelligence is not a new idea: in fact it is mythic. What is new is that our technology has arrived before our ethics can catch up. In Chap. 2, “What Pepper Can’t Do and Why We Should Care,” Ginger Grant and Cheryl De Ciantis lay out new priorities in an increasingly automated world of work: building trust through prioritizing relationship values, learning by valuing diverse views, and redefining power—getting real about who benefits from it and how.
Radical Creativity looks deeply into why commonly held views are severely limiting and suggests a relational approach to creativity that changes almost everything. It even includes developing a relationship with your own unconscious mind.
“This book is like a “get out of jail free” card for creatives struggling because of bad advice.”
- Annette Simmons, author of The Story Factor
by Kenton S. Hyatt, Kairios Press 2019
available from Amazon
Disengagement in the workplace is at an all-time high. In Chap. 12, “The Outer Reaches of Inner Space,” Ginger Grant and Cheryl De Ciantis With dig far deeper to find the sources of engagement and in work and life, down to the wellsprings of emotion, empathy, imagination, and to the roots of both individual and collective sense of purpose.
Routledge Companion to Management and Workplace Spirituality (2019)
We tend to think of the artist and technologist as having divergent aims and values. But Greek and other mythic texts/images and key etymologies show they were anciently revered, and seen as aspects of the same archetype. This book is intended to inform Makers about their mythic lineage, giving them a map to ethically navigate the twisting channels of possibility open to those who claim their gifts. This book is also for those who are fascinated by or who manage Makers.
by Cheryl De Ciantis
Kairios Press (2019) Available from Amazon
Articles, White Papers and More
Article: Values Driven Leadership
An in depth look at leadership styles as they develop from the Values Perspectives model. Four basic styles describe a wide variety of priorities and behaviors in a simple to understand model and discussion with comparisons to major leadership theory, and with historical and current examples. Values Driven Leadership was first published in “Integral Leadership Review,” October 2012.
Practitioners: Working with Values to Bridge Differences.Working together requires us to manage our individual, human differences, which is never easy. In any given group or team, there should naturally exist a diversity of backgrounds, genders, ages, nationalities, intellects, talents—as well as weaknesses. When we frame the dialogue in terms of values, instead of differences in culture, ethnicity and gender, the dialogue begins to take place in a different way. Published in Bridge Builder B-B#10, Autumn 2014, p. 40.
White Paper: Values Perspectives
Everyone has a worldview, a general perspective that frames their perceptions and provides an orientation for them. Worldviews can be organized along a continuum ranging from a perspective that is concerned with survival and stability to one that is most concerned with dynamic expansiveness. Values are distributed across this continuum and can be organized into six perspectives, Grounding, Family, Management, Relational Awareness, Systems Awareness, and Expansion. Being familiar with these six perspectives provides insight into not only your own, but how others who operate from different perspectives understand the world.
Article: Values and Leadership in the Digital Age
Digital technology and information present both challenges and opportunities for leaders, whose values based styles tend toward stability or dynamism. In this paper we show how the lens of values clarifies how leaders respond to the digital age. First published as: “Values and Leadership in the Digital Age” by Cheryl De Ciantis and Kenton Hyatt, Cahier de Prospective: Transformation numérique et nouveaux modes de management, Fondation Télécom, Institut Télécom, Carine Dartiguepeyrou, ed. May 2011.
More on Creativity and the Intersection of Myth, Culture and Technology
Cheryl De Ciantis, Using an Art Technique to Facilitate Leadership Development. Center for Creative Leadership (1995) Available through Amazon.
Cheryl De Ciantis, “What Does Drawing My Hand Have to Do With Leadership?” Journal of Aesthetic Education (1996).
Cheryl De Ciantis, The Gait of Hephaistos, Icono14, 15:1 (2017)
Kenton Hyatt, Documentary Images: Visual Information Made to Order. Visual Sociology 7:1 (2008)
Kenton Hyatt, Creativity Through Interpersonal Communication Dialogue. Journal of Creative Behavior 26:1 (1982)
Kenton Hyatt, Stieglitz, Martin Buber, and The Equivalent. History of Photography 16:4 (1982)