Values at Work

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At Work collections

Words at Work · Identities at Work · Hypotheses at Work · 🔦Values at Work

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Values at Work shines a light on values as practiced rather than proclaimed—especially overlooked, unfashionable, or costly values that shape how we work, choose, and respond.

WIP: Work in Progress | Wrong in Public

Most values pages offer admirable nouns that almost everyone endorses. The agreement is pleasant, but not especially revealing.

Values become more interesting when they make distinctions, expose trade-offs, demand something of us, or conflict with other things we also value. Trade-offs reveal values. Economics distinguishes stated preferences from revealed preferences; similarly, what we repeatedly choose—and what inconvenience or cost we accept—may say more than the values we profess.

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Proposition at Work

A value becomes editorially interesting when examining it helps us notice a distinction, confront a trade-off, or act differently.

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Why add Values at Work?

This collection is also a public experiment: an attempt to cohere overlapping material without pretending the categories are settled. The discernment behind it appears in Making the collection below.

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Values at different levels

These distinctions are aids, not a strict taxonomy. One idea may operate at several levels.

Level	What it does	Example
Value	Names what is held to matter	usefulness, care, autonomy
Tension or trade-off	Reveals relative priority	do good > look good
Principle	Converts a value into a decision rule	diagnose before prescribing
Practice	Enacts a value repeatedly	caring for, not merely caring about
Virtue or disposition	Describes a cultivated way of responding	responsibility, courage, carelessness
Ethical framework	Organizes several values and principles	Supply-Side Ethics
Alignment	Examines correspondence between values and action	calendars, habits, choices, institutional behavior
Purpose or calling	Gives direction or summons	what the value is exercised toward
Identity	Shapes who acts—and who they understand themselves to be	“the kind of person or professional who…”

Values already at work

An earlier public formulation of PoP’s values includes:

Do good > look good — resist optics-over-ethics.
Make things as simple as possible—but not simpler — resist both obscurantism and false simplicity.
Oneness: Unique + Universal — attend to how each person is like no one else and like everyone else.
Sow peace in the cultural wars — acknowledge conflict and try to turn disagreement into dialogue.
YMMV — qualify works-for-me advice by asking whether it works with another person.
Diagnose before prescribing — understand and frame before rushing toward solutions.
Be useful, usable, and used — information and inspiration are not enough.