Value Architecture

In my new work, ‘Sketches of the Future Organisation’, I introduce the idea of a Value Architecture: the way that an Organisations finds and holds value in people, systems, processes, rituals, artefacts (culture), technology in general, and AI in particular. It’s a way of digging beneath the surface level language of ‘People First’, or ‘constant change’, because what it often shows is that the architecture is shifting in ways we did not predict, and in ways we do not control. So in this sense it’s about making visible what is implicit, and hence allowing us to be in dialogue with it.

Things that once held great value, becoming disposable and things that had little value, becoming more so.

Use your sixty seconds today to consider Value: what value do you hold in the people around you? What causes you to make that assessment? And has your Value Architecture shifted in any noticeable way in the last couple of years?

For me, I’ve been wrestling with the value of parts of my practice: illustration in particular. I spend typically anywhere from thirty minutes to three hours a day illustrating the Blog or my books, and I have no intention of using AI to do so - but I also recognise that there is no logic to this. I could probably buy back five or even ten hours a week if I did so. So what ‘value’ or sense of identity is holding me back?