Who are we? What do we stand for? What makes us tick? How will we fit with your organisation? Values and culture are key for organisations and you're no doubt seeing post after post on your social media platforms about 'culture this', 'culture that'.

At Jiggity Jig, values and culture are one of the reasons why we exist in the first place, heck, we set up this business to help others in this area, as well as other things. So when it came time to defining our own, well... we hit pause. Then play, then pause, then play.

You see, it might be a good business proposition to have strong, clear, good looking, well-written values posted on our site, from the get go. Values that you can relate to (or not). A definition of our culture that reads well and from a marketing perspective can impress you with our focus and identity. That just makes good business sense, right?

Nope.

Well, at least not for us... at least, not right now...

We hold the importance of values so high, that we want to ensure that when we finally distill them into something 'marketable' that they are still, really primarily there for us, and only of importance to you, as a second priority.

Now coming in second, isn't too bad is it? It doesn't mean that putting our values out there for 'your' perspective, will be an afterthought. In fact, having our values defined 'for you' is very important to us because we already feel very strongly that we want to work with like-minded businesses and avoid partnering with organisations, that don't share our values.

Laying these thoughts bare and having prospective clients thumb their nose at us, or embrace us, based on who 'you' are as you read who 'we' are; well that's what we want.

However; how many of you have worked for companies where the values are on a poster on the wall, but they are at best, aspirational, and at worst simply there for the clients to see, but not for the staff to uphold? Or perhaps they're there for the staff to uphold but not the executives? A task that got a tick against it, but then was promptly forgotten because well, 'business'.

Too many of you have had that experience, I suspect. Kim Goodwin gives a great talk referencing aspirational values vs hidden ones here at Webstock: The Values are the Experience which we enjoyed.

At Jiggity Jig, our values and our culture are real and we've put a lot of work into our values already. We've talked for hours and hours about the things that matter to us, the things we care about, the reasons for existing as a business in the first place and critically, we agree on everything.

There are some obvious tenets for us, such as transparency, honesty, experimentation, safe to fail, iterative approach and there are also some bigger issues that are not so easy to 'define' succinctly.

So for us, we've decided to try an experiment, to be transparent and honest about our value definition journey, to iterate it openly on our site, in notes and drafts that well, might look quite messy and disjointed at times.

Do you see what we did there?

We believe there is no cookie cutter approach to things like culture, change, values, leadership and the services we offer. This is how we are going to do our values, for us.

Let's face it, your values should be for you, first and foremost, and you should also define them in a way that works for you. By the way, we can help with that.

This is how we are going to do ours. In the coming days/weeks, we will upload some of these thoughts we've been working on, on to our values page.

Oh and now would be a good time to reference how inspired we are by Brad Frost's Webstock talk "Give it Away, Give it Away, Give it Away Now"

Let us know what you think of this experiment and if you like it, please share it.