FoundationPrepare20–30 min

The values yardstick

Every module after this one teaches mechanics — framing the question, running the room, counting the poll, sealing the record. This module is about the standard all of that answers to. A group does not decide well by gathering more data or by averaging more opinions; it decides well by reasoning against its own stated values, in its own circumstances. By the end you can surface a group's values from its own words — nobody writes them for it — hold two of them in tension without flattening either, and test a finished decision with one question: does this honour what we said we stand for? The worksheet at the end is the yardstick; it joins the kit you fill in the capstone.

Watch this happen: in the demo, two members object to a proposal that passes anyway — and both objections invoke the collective's own values, one against another. Watch the dissent travel with the decision, then come back: this module explains why that decision is legitimate, and why the same tally with the objections smoothed over would not have been.

What makes a decision good

Ask what makes a group decision good and most answers reach for size: a bigger majority, a wider survey, more evidence. All three help; none is the standard. More data narrows uncertainty about facts — it cannot tell a group what it owes its members or its neighbours. A wider majority tells you the decision was popular, not that it was right for this group. And there is a way of answering that produces answers to nobody's question in particular: ask what most groups in this position would do. Averaged assumptions give stale answers, because the average group does not exist and did not make your promises.

The standard that remains is the group's own: the values it has stated, applied to the circumstances it is actually in. The legitimacy test for any decision is one sentence — does this decision honour what we said we stand for? Not "did enough of us want it", and not "would a sensible group somewhere do this", but: measured against our own words, does it hold?

Key points

Data settles questions of fact. Values settle what the group owes — no quantity of the first substitutes for the second.
An answer averaged from groups-in-general is an answer to no group's question in particular.
The yardstick is set before the proposal, for the same reason Module 1 fixes the decision rule before the argument: a standard chosen after positions are known is a weapon, not a standard.

Example — Fernside Garden Collective. VA-2026-014 — eight plots converted to a winter food-bank bed — was adopted with 12 in favour, 2 standing aside, 2 objecting. What makes it legitimate is not the twelve. It is that all sixteen voters were arguing from things Fernside had already said about itself: the charter's "we grow for the street, not just the plot-holder" on one side, the plot tenure every member signed for on the other. The decision was weighed against both, and the strained value kept its voice in the record.

Whose values — and who may write them

The values must be the group's own. That sounds obvious, and it is broken constantly: every time a facilitator opens with a drafted values statement for the room to nod at, every time a template offers a menu of community values to tick, every time a survey ranks "what matters most" into a league table. Each of those puts someone else's words where the group's should be — and a yardstick nobody recognises as their own measures nothing.

The discipline in this course is working from the floor. Three moves are allowed, and only three: extract — lift a value from something members have actually said, and keep their wording; juxtapose — set two of their statements side by side and ask "both of these are ours; how do they sit together?"; ask — put a question the group answers itself. What is never allowed: writing a value for the group, ranking its values for it, or grading how well it lives up to them. Whoever holds the pen — a chairperson, a keen new member, a facilitator, an AI — the rule is the same: they may hold the mirror; they may not paint the portrait.

Village Assembly practises this same discipline under the name value-constitution: a standing record of the group's stated values, built from members' own words, which its facilitator can quote from and ask about but never add to. The practice is older than any software — it is what a careful chairperson has always done with a charter and a minute-book — and this module teaches the practice, not the product.

Where values are held in tikanga: for a rōpū whose values rest in tikanga or in te Tiriti o Waitangi, working from the floor is not a courtesy but the whole point. Those values enter the sheet in the words of the people who hold them — never paraphrased into the record by a facilitator, and never voiced by an AI.

Articulating the values: three places to look

A group that has never written its values down still has them. They live in three places, and surfacing them is mostly transcription:

The three sources

The founding purpose. The charter, the constitution, the kaupapa, the notice that called the first meeting. Quote the exact words — founding documents are usually blunter and better than anyone remembers.
Past decisions. What the group actually did when it had to choose is a value with a date on it. "We turned down the sponsorship in 2023" says more than any mission statement.
This deliberation's own reasoning. The position-and-reasoning format of Module 2 is a values mine: the reason under a position is usually a value in work clothes. When Elena argues tenure, Fernside is hearing one of its values state itself.

State them plainly. A value on the sheet is a sentence a member actually said, or one every member would recognise as theirs — attributed, dated, in ordinary words. "We grow for the street" is a value. "Fernside empowers sustainable community synergies" is a brand exercise, and no one can be held to it.

Hold the tension; never average it. Two values pulling against each other is not a failure of the sheet — it is the sheet working. The worst response is to merge them into something blander that nobody said, so the words stop meaning anything and the disagreement goes underground. Write both, attribute both, and let the deliberation do its work in the open. Disagreement about values is legitimate; it is preserved, not dissolved.

Example. At Fernside the tension was on the table within a day. Ana quoted the charter: grown for the street, not just the plot-holder. Elena answered with what joining had meant: a plot of one's own, and "the day a majority can vote a member's plot into common use, tenure here means nothing." Ruth added a third value nobody had ever written down: a bed needs named hands — "named plots get tended because someone's name is on them." None of the three is a misreading. All three are Fernside. The sheet's job is to hold all three in view — not to referee.

Discussion topics

What did your group's founding document actually say it was for? When did anyone last read it aloud?
Name one past decision of your group that expresses a value nobody has ever written down. What would the sentence be — and whose name would go beside it?

Judging the decision against the yardstick

The sheet earns its keep at two moments. During deliberation, it lets the room see which value each argument is standing on — and a proposal that serves one value while straining another should say so in its own text. Amendments are how a proposal negotiates with a value it strains. After the count, it is the legitimacy test: for each value on the sheet, the decision either honours it, trades it off and names the trade, or passes over it in silence. Silence is the failure mode. A named trade-off is a decision; an unnamed one is a wound that reopens.

Example — VA-2026-014 against Fernside's sheet. Grown for the street: honoured — it is the proposal's whole purpose. A plot of one's own: strained, and named — Elena's objection stands in the record in her own words, and three amendments are the proposal negotiating with the strain: plots drawn by ballot so the burden falls on everyone equally, an automatic sunset on 30 September, first right of return in October. Named hands tend beds: strained, named, and answered only by the Saturday roster — so Ruth's objection stays in the record, and if July proves her right, the group already knows it was told. That is what a legitimate decision looks like: not one that satisfied every value, but one visibly weighed against all of them, with the dissenting values travelling alongside it (Module 4).

Key points

The test is not "did every value win" — values in tension guarantee some cannot — but "was every value weighed, and every trade named".
A decision that quietly violates a stated value does not retire the value. It retires the sheet: members stop believing the words, and the next deliberation starts from cynicism.
The sunset date (Module 1) is where a strained value gets its rehearing — with a season's real numbers instead of predictions.

The Values Worksheet

One page, two parts. Part A is the standing yardstick: filled in from the three sources, dated, kept with the group's records, and revised only by the group itself. Part B is run against each proposal before its poll closes. Nobody grades either part — no chairperson, no facilitator, no software. The sheet asks; the group answers.

Part A — the yardstick

The value, in our own words	Whose words, and where from	What it commits us to
e.g. "We grow for the street, not just the plot-holder."	Charter, clause 2 — read aloud at every AGM	Surplus and shared beds serve the neighbourhood first

Part B — judge the decision against these

Check	Ask
Weighed	For each value in Part A: does this proposal honour it, trade it off, or pass over it in silence? No silences.
Named	Is every trade-off stated in the proposal's own text or the record — not discovered later by whoever paid it?
Heard	Has everyone whose value is strained given a position with reasoning (Module 2), not just a vote?
Preserved	Does the dissenting value travel with the decision, verbatim and attributed (Module 4) — not averaged into "mixed feedback"?
The sentence	Can the group say, in one sentence, how this decision honours what it said it stands for — and where it knowingly paid?

You don't need us for this. A page in the minute-book headed "What we stand for" — each line a member's own words, with a name and a date — does everything Part A does, and Part B is ten minutes with that page open before any poll closes. Village Assembly keeps the same page behind a link as the group's value-constitution; its facilitator can quote it and ask about it, and can never write to it or score against it. Convenient — but it is one good way of keeping a discipline any group can keep with paper.

Self-check

1. Where do the values on the worksheet come from?

Extract, juxtapose, ask — never author, rank, or grade. A drafted statement, a ticked menu, or an inferred score all put someone else's words where the group's should be, and a yardstick nobody recognises as their own measures nothing.

2. VA-2026-014 was adopted 12 in favour, 2 aside, 2 objecting. What makes the decision legitimate?

The same tally with Elena's and Ruth's values passed over in silence would be arithmetic, not legitimacy. Data established the shortfall but could not say what Fernside owed anyone about it, and two members left the poll unhappy — recorded, attributed, and still members. The test is the sentence: does this honour what we said we stand for?

3. Two of your group's stated values pull against each other. What does this method do with them?

Tension between values is the sheet working, not failing. Merging produces a sentence nobody said; ranking retires a value some members still hold; refereeing hands the group's identity to whoever holds the pen. Disagreement about values is legitimate and preserved — the tension is what the deliberation is for.

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