At Work with The Ready Brave New Work 37. How to Pick Your Principles
May 25, 2020
Aaron Dignan, co-founder of The Ready and a thought leader in organizational transformation, teams up with Rodney Evans, an expert in collaborative work environments. They dive into the art of crafting and applying principles that guide decision-making beyond traditional corporate values. Discussing the importance of transparency, discomfort in growth, and collective agreement on team principles, they highlight how actionable guidelines can align teams and promote positive collaboration while leaving space for judgment and experimentation.
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Principles Over Values
- Principles are heuristics or doctrines that guide behavior and decision-making better than vague corporate values.
- Aaron Dignan argues principles let you plan responses before stress-driven reactions take over.
Use Principles As Decision Filters
- Use principles as action-oriented filters to test choices: ask whether a decision moves you toward or away from a principle.
- Rodney Evans recommends drafting principles that are useful and actionable, not neutral slogans.
Make Principles Specific
- High-level labels like "transparency" can be ambiguous and unhelpful without context.
- Rodney and Aaron show that specificity (e.g., "default to open") reveals actionable meaning behind broad principles.