Change work is values work | Words for Changemakers

Change work is values work

To work with values is to work with the mindsets and motivations that catalyse or constrain change. Understanding how values function as a system in dynamic tension enables changemakers to frame and reframe messages with strategic clarity.

For what it’s worth

Values are broad, desirable goals that guide our choices and motivate action across situations and over time. People can be motivated by the full spectrum of human values, depending on context and priming, but we cannot act on opposing values at the same moment. Hence the tension. We weigh competing values, often unconsciously, and the resulting hierarchy of values shapes our perception, judgement and behaviour.

Roots and routes

Value derives from Latin valēre ‘to be strong, to be well, to be worth’.

Value is a central concept in ethics and economics. The meanings are linked but distinct; language and context select the intended sense. The language of care and relationships (e.g., kindness, helpfulness, honesty) signals ethical value. The language of commerce and transactions (e.g., price, cost, return on investment) signals economic value. In ethics, we appraise actions and ideals; in economics, we appraise goods and services. In both senses, evaluation is at work: to value is to judge something as worth doing or having.

Worth you count and worth you count on

Reciprocity is a core principle that aligns moral and material worth. It has deep evolutionary roots because humans have long weighed trust and trade in tandem. Reciprocity, reputation and shared norms have favoured partners who can be trusted. Over millennia, language, culture and cognition co-evolved to coordinate both care and commerce. Values are ancient, deeply felt and profoundly social.

Blood and guts, stars and stones

Despite their centrality to human evolution and experience, values are hard to describe. As with many abstract concepts, we use metaphors to convey meaning.

We turn to the directional: values are our North Star; they guide our actions and keep us on track. A moral compass provides a bearing when we’re at a crossroads or the path is uncertain. Values act as signposts for reasoning, which makes them exceptionally powerful in messaging (more on this later).

We turn to the visceral: hearts of gold and nerves of steel; strength of character and the guts to act. Bad blood and blood that’s worth bottling. A feeling in your bones, a fire in the belly, skin in the game and showing some spine. These metaphors make values feel embodied and shared, reminding us of our common humanity and readying us to act.

And we turn to structures: we talk of bedrock, cornerstones, keystones and foundations. Shared values give societies structure, support and stability; they provide the architecture of belonging.

Cashing our chips

Now cue the record scratch.

In community leadership and changemaking, we often reach for market metaphors to describe things that are priceless. We do this automatically, not because the metaphors are apt, but because they’re culturally dominant and familiar.

People become customers, communities become assets, and purpose becomes a business case. These subtle language shifts matter. Reasoning about cost and returns slips unnoticed into conversations about care and belonging when we use transactional language for relational values.

Remember, values act as signposts for reasoning. We can only go in one direction at a time. Different reasoning pathways lead to different outcomes. Transactional language leads to calculation; relational language leads to connection.

Count or count on?

Contrast a typical transactional value frame with a relational value frame for the same topic, and notice the shifts in perception, reasoning and potential outcomes.

It’s all in your head

Values are encoded in words, frames and metaphors. They are mediated by neural networks in the brain that guide emotion, cognition and behaviour. Language cues semantic frames that shift activity across neural networks supporting valuation, salience and control, shaping what feels relevant and reasonable.

When we speak in economic terms, we prime people to transact. Transactional framing directs our reasoning towards economic worth and is associated with vigilance, comparison and trade-off appraisal. This emphasis aligns with threat-monitoring and goal-directed control processes within these neural networks. Sensitivity to risk and loss increases; quick returns, tighter control and shorter timelines are preferred.

When we speak in ethical terms, we invite people to relate. Relational framing directs our reasoning towards ethical worth and engages social valuation and perspective-taking processes within these neural networks. Care and trust feel intrinsically rewarding; tolerance for complexity rises; attention shifts to fair process and longer horizons.

These modes often compete for priority in the moment. When one dominates, the other is less accessible, creating a toggle between economic and ethical appraisals. Mixed signals can increase conflict monitoring in cognitive networks, obscuring a clear course of action.

Describing relational aims in transactional language mixes value signals: we cue competing appraisals at once. Without a clear signpost for reasoning, the message can lead the audience in an unintended direction or get lost along the way.

Metaphors and mindsets

Mindsets and worldviews are enduring frameworks through which we interpret reality. They are shaped by linguistic structures, such as metaphors and frames, because these structures influence what we notice and how we reason. Metaphors and frames encode value signals. Recurring frames reinforce shared understandings of meaning, fairness and purpose, which then coalesce into shared values and social norms. Change the values encoded in language, and mindsets begin to shift, along with the shared values and social norms that people live by. This is why systems change must start with language change.

A framework for change

In the early 1990s, Professor Shalom Schwartz proposed that human values reflect universal congruences and conflicts that map onto a circular continuum (a circumplex). This structure has been validated through statistical analyses across countries, cultures and languages over several decades. It remains the most-used and most-cited conceptualisation of values across the social and psychological sciences.

Understanding this framework enables changemakers to frame and reframe with confidence. It helps you foreground, through language, the values that serve your changemaking intent and to avoid mixed or counterproductive signals.

The circumplex shows interrelationships between ten basic values (inner wheel, with characteristic value types shown) and how they converge and diverge within a system of motivational tensions. Congruent values cluster near each other, while conflicting values sit further apart or in opposing positions. In short, the layout encodes patterned co-occurrence and conflict.

Two higher-order motivational continua (inner ring) capture these tensions, with values mapped from self-transcendence (benevolence, universalism) to self-enhancement (achievement, power), and from openness to change (self-direction, stimulation, hedonism) to conservation (security, conformity, tradition).

Drawing attention to one cluster of values through language cues tends to dampen its opposite and co-activate neighbouring, complementary values via spreading activation. Values work is systemic; you are never engaging a single value in isolation.

Focus of concern (middle ring) asks who the motivation is for. Social-focus values (self-transcendence, conservation) turn attention outwards to “we” and “us”; personal-focus values (self-enhancement, openness to change) turn attention inwards to “me” and “mine”. Note how the focus of concern shifts as we move around the circle. “We want to” (benevolence, universalism) leans into “we have to” (conformity, tradition, security), and “I want to” (self-direction, stimulation, hedonism) tightens into “I have to/I must” (achievement, power).

Motivational orientation (outer ring) distinguishes anxiety-free, growth-orientated values (benevolence, universalism, self-direction, stimulation, hedonism), tuned to opportunity, from anxiety-based, protection-orientated values (conformity, tradition, security, power, achievement), tuned to risk. Here, anxiety refers to the uncertainty inherent in change. We either see the opportunities in change and move towards growth or guard against change and reinforce the status quo.

The sweet spot for change

Language cues that encode and activate benevolence, universalism and self-direction lie at the sweet spot for positive social and environmental change, because this is where possibility and purpose meet concern for the greater good. These cues bring compassion, connection and curiosity to the fore and orientate people towards the possibilities of change.

When language centres the values of benevolence, universalism and self-direction values, it quietens the motivational pulls of control, status and preservation of the current state. Relational cues, signalled by words such as fairness, compassion and collaboration, open hearts and minds, while transactional cues, signalled by terms such as customers, targets, ROI and resources, narrow attention to calculation, comparison and competition.

There’s more to explore in value dynamics, including tensions and opportunities for change across other motivational dimensions, but those are stories for another day.

Tips for changemakers:

· Start with the sweet spot. Centre the values of benevolence, universalism and self-direction to cue compassion, connection and curiosity. When you’re planning your communications, think: “How can I make my message about these values?” In values-based messaging, values provide the frame through which we reason about the information that follows. Remember: you’re framing anyway, so make the most of opportunities to connect and create change by choosing a clear framing choice when presenting information.

· Flip, pivot or hop. If your change message is activating the anxiety-based values that reinforce the status quo, consider how you might shift your language cues to move into the value sweet spot. For example, focusing on the higher purpose of your changemaking initiative works well for fundraising communications, and hopping or pivoting from security to conformity to universalism works well for biosecurity communications (e.g., “from do what you’re told” to “do the right thing”).

· Orientate your change narrative. Start with the signpost. Values guide reasoning. We can only go in one direction at a time. Decide where you want people to go with your message and choose the values, frames, metaphors and imagery that will lead them there. Keep your language cues clear, consistent and coherent. Repeated choices accumulate, shaping mindsets and motivations. Make sure they shape the future you intend. Use the Schwartz circumplex as your guide.

· Check your cues. Scan your language for transactional terms that slip in unnoticed, and derail your relational message. If a community engagement piece reads like a financial analysis, put some heart and grounding back in through your choice of frames and metaphors. Quick swaps: “work alongside” instead of “leverage”; “people/residents” instead of “customers”; “community wellbeing” instead of “ROI”; “learn with” instead of “extract insights”; “pathways” instead of “pipelines”; “focus areas” instead of “targets”.

· Approach emerging tools with curiosity. Recent advances in computational linguistics reveal value signals in speech and text at corpus scale, strengthening social and environmental research, as well as communication planning and assessment. Potential applications include identifying value cues encoded in community feedback to better understand sentiment ahead of an upcoming contentious meeting.

· Prompting change. Community-facing organisations and agencies are increasingly entrusting their communications to generative AI. When using AI, set clear prompts and a style guide so outputs reflect and amplify your values, rather than the values of the internet that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity are trained on.

· Lead norms and create the change you seek to make. Values are contagious. People calibrate their personal values to those they perceive in leaders, changemakers, institutions and communities, which means you can lead, not just reflect, social values. How we message is how we go forward: compassion, connection and curiosity frames will create different futures than calculation, competition and comparison frames.

Wise words

“Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals or nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.” Ben Okri

(Photo by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash)

Go Deeper

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Fisher, J., Feng, S., Aron, R., Richardson, T., Choi, Y., Fisher, D. W., Pan, J., Tsvetkov, Y., & Reinecke, K. (2025). Biased LLMs can influence political decision-making. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (pp. 6559–6607). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.328/ aclanthology.org

Hackel, L. M., Wills, J. A., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2020). Shifting prosocial intuitions: Neurocognitive evidence for a value-based account of group-based cooperation. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 15, 371–381. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsaa055

Monbiot, G. (2018). The pricing of everything [Transcript of the SPERI Annual Lecture]. The Ecological Citizen, 2, 89–96. https://ecologicalcitizen.net/article.php?t=pricing-everything ecologicalcitizen.net

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Ponizovskiy, V., Ardag, M., Grigoryan, L., Boyd, R., Dobewall, H., & Holtz, P. (2020). Development and validation of the Personal Values Dictionary: A theory-driven tool for investigating references to basic human values in text. European Journal of Personality, 34(5), 885–902. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2294

Ryan, T. (2025). “Doing politics differently”: What can linguistic analyses of federal parliamentary speech reveal about the values orientation of Community Independents and their Liberal Party predecessors? Unpublished Master’s research project, University of New England. https://wordsforchange.com.au/research#doingvaluesdifferently

Sagiv, L., & Schwartz, S. H. (2022). Personal values across cultures. Annual Review of Psychology, 73, 517–546. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-125100

Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An overview of the Schwartz theory of basic values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2, Article 11. https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1116

Schwartz, S. H., Cieciuch, J., Vecchione, M., Davidov, E., Fischer, R., Beierlein, C., Ramos, A., Verkasalo, M., Lönnqvist, J.-E., Demirutku, K., Dirilen-Gumus, O., & Konty, M. (2012). Refining the theory of basic individual values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103, 663–688. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029393