“What does brushing your teeth for two minutes do for you? Absolutely nothing…unless you do it every single day.“ This is Simon Sinek, nailing the way our corporate cultures love to “fix” problems with intensive eye-catching actions.

Isn’t this exactly how so many organisations go about practising their values?  A quick fix, a blitz of activity and then…nothing. No follow through.

Intensity is not enough. Practising our values is something we need to do every single day. Quick fixes are the corporate way.  Consistency  – keeping those values alive, carrying on doing the small things that matter  –  is the human way.

When the RSA, the Forward Institute and the UK Values Alliance came together to set up the Values Challenge to get groups and organisations of every kind to address the gap between the values they say they have and what actually happens in practice, this was one of the key messages we wanted to get across. Those of us involved in running any organisation or part of it will know how we love devising big eye-catching strategies when we hit a problem. There is nothing wrong with that, but it’s not enough. If we want to really embed our organisation’s core values in its culture we need everyone to be involved, and we need to keep on doing it over and over and over again.

Continue reading Charles Fowler’s blog on the RSA website here.