. The large number of employees also makes a code of conduct unavoidable. In many places, this also includes values that are desirable and are even used to evaluate employees and managers.

What happens again and again in everyday organizational life is that values are given in the hope that they will have an immediate generative effect. Values are therefore often highlighted in management workshops, propagated in training courses or strived for by senior management. This is particularly noticeable when a change project is announced that is based on establishing new, better values: "We need to become more effective, more innovative, more entrepreneurial, more agile, build a culture of error, become a family, drive cultural change."

General lack of understanding of the importance of values

If values are defined in this way in advance and often from above, this testifies to a general lack of understanding of how values arise and work. Values are complex in nature and are therefore not compatible with mechanistic approaches. Everyone knows, for example, that trust cannot be prescribed, but is created through long-term processes with suitable framework conditions.

The attempt to prescribe values and perceive them as a purely technical challenge will therefore fail. Many coaches and consultants will be familiar with this moment of perplexity when a client wants to change the culture in the company or the much-cited mindset, as if tweaking the appropriate parameters could achieve this.

Values that are developed in workshops, for example, are not wrong per se, but all too often the desired or learned values that can be found on websites and in codes of conduct are asked for. Dave Snowden, an expert in complexity thinking and knowledge management, puts it this way: "Once you've written down your values, you've lost them." In other words, you show your employees what you want to hear without actually changing anything. If these values are then not exemplified by senior management, they mutate from guiding principles to rigid guidelines that encourage lip service rather than genuine, value-based action.

How are values created? - Value specifications versus value streams

Furthermore, such values are far too coarse-grained to serve as real guidelines for day-to-day behavior. There is a danger here of confusing organizational value specifications with the actual, lived and finely woven "value streams". Real organizational life is far richer and more turbulent than what is described in official documents.

It is therefore worth looking at values from a different perspective that does not rely on mechanistic metaphors. In this context, values are the results of complex interactions, relationships and experiences within a human system. They emerge from the interplay of multiple factors, including individual beliefs, social dynamics and organizational cultures.

They emerge from the sum total of all daily interactions, decisions and experiences of everyone in the organization. They evolve as the company itself evolves. They are therefore an expression of the collective intelligence and adaptive learning of an organization and show what is really important to the company. In short, values are like a company's dynamic navigation system, constantly updating itself to keep it on the best path.

Building a culture of values

Working with values at this level in the company requires a nuanced approach. In organizational development, cultural change and value discussions, the key is to work with what is there rather than what should be there. It's about recognizing which values are actually lived and shape the culture:

• How do people treat each other?
• How do managers treat their employees?
• What values are exemplified?
• What kind of meeting culture prevails?
• Are mistakes allowed?
• How are decisions made?
• How do people learn?
• Do employees trust each other?

All of this reveals the underlying finely spun "value currents" which - consciously or unconsciously - have a culture-forming effect in their entirety.

Coaches and consultants are predestined to work with their clients at all hierarchical levels to find out which values are currently practiced in the company and which ideal and structural framework conditions have allowed these values to develop. They recognize individual and collective attitudes, frustrations, ideas, suggestions for improvement or even pathologies. They can reflect this back to the system at the appropriate hierarchical levels - and make many of the living things conscious. In this way, the system recognizes itself in order to be able to act. On the basis of this sensemaking, it is then necessary to shape processes at each hierarchical level or to help change the framework conditions of relationship dynamics in such a way that something new can emerge from the starting position that is more in line with the changed value requirements.