Day Six Pt. 1

Friday 2017-03-17

Participants: Janina Abels, Paul Free, Matthias Larisch, Bodhi Neiser

We had the 'homework' to think about our personal values and write them down on little pieces of paper, to then collect and cluster them (like we already became used to) first thing in the morning.

Most of us had problems to clearly distinguish values from needs and motivations and we all agreed, that all of these terms have big overlaps or are very close to each other at least. We still came up with some more or less accurate definitions, though:

Janina: Needs are the more emotional, biological and not necessarily thought-through things, that have an influence on my actions, whereas values are abstract concepts, which I came to follow because of the rational realization of their significance. So needs are more intuitive and values are more rational. Maybe. Not sure though, because one could also say, that everyone has a certain set of values, and that it really doesn't matter of they know about that or not...

Paul: I wrote the same things for motivation, needs and values because of lazyness. (After Janina asked, if he didn't have any problem with doing this. But hey, he's pretty ill on this day...)

Matthias: I really don't know what values are... but I have the feeling they should be written down as single nouns.

Bodhi: Aren't values the same things as needs..? No, not really, but... hm.

We tried to cluster the values and thought of the methods used before, which were semantic clustering and creating a range from basic to sophisticated. This time nothing seemed to fit. (Maybe this was also due to exhaustion because of the long and lengthy process, but who can ever know for sure...) Whatever the reason, we started presenting the values one person at a time, which held the benefit of the individuals being able to point out the personally perceived interdependencies of the values mentioned. (Sadly I didn't take notes on this and write this page multiple days after it happened, so I forgot quite a lot... maybe even some values themselves, pardon.)

Matthias started presenting his values: purposeful use of time, friendlyness, mindfulness, safety, sustainability, helpfulness

Janina was next: authenticity, independent thinking, flexibility, consequence in thought and action, loyalty, mindfulness, openness

Then Paul: freedom, self-determination, collaboration, openness/honesty, mindfulness

And last Bodhi: mindfulness, sustainability, authenticity,

We then went through the presented values and looked at them with a different question again: "Could this also be a group value for us?"
First we eliminated some values, we could easily get rid of. When that got increasingly hard we switched the direction and directly decided on values to accept as group values, always accompanied by clarifiying talks and discussions, since one-noun-concepts normally offer a wide range of possible interpretations. The outcome of this process can be found on our proposal for group values.