Beyond Values: What do you believe? And can anyone tell?

This September, I will graduate from a postgraduate course, something I never envisaged myself doing.

I did my first degree in Art and, although I feel privileged to have studied something I loved, I never felt that it prepared me one iota for the world of work. Most of my personal and professional development seemed to happen through experience, and I suppose I came to assume that life, reading and following whatever interested me would fill in the other gaps.

But life has a habit of throwing curveballs. When everything I thought I knew was turned upside down, I found myself carrying some big questions about the world and our place within it. Instinctively, I felt I needed the space to study again, this time stepping into a world that was very unfamiliar to me: the social sciences.

What surprised me most was discovering that science does not have all the answers. In fact, part of studying it seriously is understanding just how much remains uncertain, contested or dependent on the lens through which we look.

What it does offer are some deeply interesting tools and frameworks for thinking, and I began to wonder whether they are ideas we could all benefit from grappling with a little more.

In particular, I became fascinated by three slightly intimidating words:

Epistemology, Ontology, Axiology.

Before starting the course, I couldn't have confidently told you what any of them meant. Now, I find myself thinking about them often, including in my work with Taylesmith.

In very simple terms:

Ontology asks what we believe about the nature of reality. How do we understand the world we are operating within?

Epistemology asks how we know what we know. What counts as knowledge? What evidence do we trust? Whose expertise do we listen to?

Axiology is concerned with value. What matters to us? What do we consider good, worthwhile or important?

Together, these things begin to describe our positionality: the place from which we see and interpret the world.

And the more I learned about positionality, the more interesting it became, because none of us arrives at a problem completely neutral.

We carry our experiences, values, education, assumptions, culture and beliefs with us. They influence what we notice, the questions we ask, the evidence we find persuasive and, ultimately, the conclusions we reach.

For me, learning this was strangely liberating. I had gone back into education partly expecting academic study to provide something more definitive: evidence, theory, perhaps even a firmer version of ‘the truth’. Instead, some of the most valuable learning encouraged me to become more comfortable with uncertainty, to question where knowledge comes from, and to understand my own way of seeing the world as something worth examining rather than something that needed to be removed from the process.

Inevitably, I started thinking about how this could be applied to my work with clients.

Where did all our opinions go?

I work with businesses to help them communicate what they do, what makes them different and why somebody should choose them. Much of that work sits in professional consultancy, particularly construction and the built environment.

These are businesses full of incredibly knowledgeable people. They design buildings, shape places, advise organisations spending millions of pounds, solve complicated problems and make decisions that can influence people's lives for decades.

And yet, read enough consultancy websites, bids or capability statements and … Everybody begins to sound remarkably similar.

Quality, Collaboration, Innovation, Technical excellence, Communication, Client focus, Deliver. All worthwhile, but are they really a point of view?

Increasingly, I wonder whether businesses spend so much time trying to demonstrate that they are capable of doing everything that they forget to tell us what they actually think.

So…

• What do you believe about the industry you work within?

• What do you think it gets wrong?

• What does better look like?

• What kinds of knowledge do you value?

• What are you unwilling to compromise on?

• What do you think your work is ultimately for?

Those questions take us somewhere much deeper than the traditional exercise of choosing three corporate values for the bottom of an ‘About Us’ page.

They start to touch on ontology, epistemology and axiology, and I think they are much more interesting.

A brand is a way of seeing

We often talk about brands as things businesses create. You’re familiar; a logo, tone of voice, website, colour palette, a proposition. But for me, the most compelling brands don’t pivot on these components.

A good brand begins with a worldview. That belief influences the work it pursues, the problems it notices, the people it employs, the solutions it develops and the evidence that it pays attention to.

You understand why that organisation exists and, crucially, why it might approach a problem differently from somebody else. That is much harder to manufacture through marketing because it has to come from somewhere real.

There is a risk in standing for something

A genuine position inevitably excludes something. To say this matters is, (at least implicitly), to say that something else matters less.

That can feel uncomfortable, particularly in consultancy environments where businesses want to remain suitable for as many clients, frameworks and opportunities as possible.

So the language gets safer, the sharp edges disappear and eventually, everybody is innovative, collaborative, sustainable and client-focused, ie. nobody is wrong! But nobody is particularly distinctive either.

I don't think the answer is louder marketing, but I do think it might be deeper thinking.

Knowing what you think

We're living through an extraordinary period of access to information. Knowledge that once took hours or days to find can be retrieved in seconds and content can be generated almost instantly.

That makes me think positionality might become more important, not less. If information itself becomes increasingly abundant, perhaps the real value moves towards interpretation.

• What do you notice?

• What do you question?

• What do you believe matters?

• What connections do you make?

• What are you prepared to say?

I went back to university expecting to learn more about a particular subject. Instead, one of the most useful things I learned was to pay closer attention to the place from which I was doing the learning. And I've found myself wondering whether businesses might benefit from doing the same.

So perhaps before your next brand workshop, strategy session, website rewrite or bid, there are a few more fundamental questions worth asking.

What is our way of seeing the world?

What has shaped it?

What do we believe our work should contribute to it?

And perhaps most importantly:

Can anyone tell?