Competing Values Are Paralyzing Your Organization

The Symptoms of Competing Values

Your strategy meetings drag on for hours. Projects stall in endless approval loops. Teams feel frustrated, but no one can pinpoint why. The culprit isn't poor planning or bad management.

Instead, it's the invisible war between your organization's competing values, creating what many would call systemic dysfunction that most people never recognize (which others would argue is a by-product of the system's implicit design ... but that's a conversation for another day).

The Values-Systems Connection

In complex adaptive challenges, values operate like competing operating systems within your organization. Each value drives different behaviors, creates different priorities, and generates different feedback loops.

When innovation clashes with risk management, or speed conflicts with quality, you're not dealing with simple trade-offs—you're witnessing a systems-level battle where each value reinforces its own cause-and-effect chains.

Think of it as organizational physics: every strongly held value creates gravitational pull, drawing resources, attention, and decision-making toward its orbit. When multiple values compete with equal intensity, they create organizational paralysis - the equivalent of being pulled in opposite directions by equally strong forces.

In essence, you are attempting to floor the gas petal on a car with the parking brake activated: lots of energy wasted, with little to no progress.

The Innovation-Security Paradox

Consider TechCorp, a mid-sized software company that prided itself on both "cutting-edge innovation" and "enterprise-grade security." These values seemed complementary until they began launching contradictory system dynamics.

Innovation drove rapid prototyping, quick market entry, and experimental features. Security demanded thorough testing, compliance reviews, and risk assessment. Each department strengthened its own feedback loops: Innovation celebrated speed-to-market wins, while Security prevented costly breaches.

Both were "right", and together, they created gridlock.

Projects would start with innovation momentum, then hit security checkpoints that felt like walls. Security became the "department of no," while Innovation was seen as "reckless." Neither side could see the system they'd created together: one where competing values generated escalating tension instead of complementary strength.

Mapping the System

The breakthrough came when leadership mapped the cause-and-effect relationships. They discovered that their values conflict was generating three systemic problems: delayed product launches, demoralized teams, and increasing customer complaints about both speed and stability.

Instead of choosing between values, they redesigned the system to integrate them. They embedded security expertise within innovation teams and created shared metrics that measured both speed and safety. The values stopped competing and started collaborating.

Your Action Step

Map your own competing values by identifying where your organization consistently gets stuck. Ask: "What two things do we say we value that might be pulling us in opposite directions?" Then trace the cause-and-effect chains each value creates. Where do they reinforce each other? Where do they conflict?

Breaking Through the Gridlock

Values conflicts in adaptive challenges require more than compromise.

They need system redesign. When your organization feels perpetually stuck despite everyone's best efforts, the answer isn't working harder within the current system. It's understanding how your values are shaping that system and redesigning it to serve your mission rather than sabotage it.

Ready to map your organization's hidden value systems and break through adaptive challenges? Let's explore how facilitated systems mapping can transform your team's effectiveness and unlock the potential trapped in competing priorities.