Values In Action: A Critical Systems Heuristics Workbook
Values in Action is a hands-on, thought-provoking and practical workbook designed to equip people with tools to explore, question, and strengthen the ethical and practical foundations of their and others' decision-making.
The purpose of the workbook is to enable you and others make well-grounded claims that whatever you are doing is the right thing to do. That claim to ‘rightness’ is, individually and collectively, yours and will almost certainly be challenged. Critical Systems Heuristics helps you to engage constructively and ethically with those challenges. It will help you identify and determine whether the key decisions made by every intervention, strategy, plan, evaluation or policy were, are or will be the right thing to do.
Grounded in Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH), the workbook helps you to identify whose values shape an intervention, who or what benefits from them, who or what doesn't benefit, what knowledge is prioritised, and what legitimises and sustains that intervention. Whether used on your own or as part of a team, the CSH framework is useful for anyone working in complex environments who wants to better navigate ambiguity, power, and competing perspectives.
The workbook is useful for any intervention, including strategy, evaluation, planning and policy.
For Strategy:
Strategic decisions are often made under uncertainty, where competing visions of success and hidden value judgments can derail progress. Values in Action provides a structured method to clarify what truly matters, examine who benefits, and ensure that strategies are not only efficient but ethically grounded. By distinguishing between what is and what ought to be, this workbook supports long-term thinking that aligns with diverse stakeholder aspirations and adaptive learning.
For Evaluation:
Evaluation is more than just assessing outcomes. It is about understanding merit, worth, and significance. This workbook frames evaluation as a value determined practice, and guides evaluators through exercises that expose whose values are embedded in evaluation questions, methods, and interpretations. It is especially powerful in complex, contested, or cross-cultural settings where conventional evaluation approaches may fall short.
For Planning:
Planning processes often assume agreement about goals, roles, and evidence. Values in Action invites planners to test those assumptions, surface underlying worldviews, and anticipate value conflicts before they become blockages. The workbook’s practical structure makes it ideal for participatory planning, helping teams move from intentions to actions with greater clarity, legitimacy, and resilience.
For Policy Development:
Policy is inherently a normative endeavour concerned with what should be done. Yet policies frequently reflect hidden biases or fail to acknowledge those most affected; especially negatively affected. This workbook enables policy developers to interrogate whose voices are included, what forms of knowledge are valued, and what trade-offs are ethically defensible. It is particularly useful in areas such as health, environment, and social justice, where policy decisions carry deep value-based moral implications.
The workbook is donationware. You are welcome to download it for free. However, to help me cover the costs of preparation and publication, please consider donating the cost of a cup of coffee in my part of the world ($5), or more if you think this workbook will be especially valuable to you. Thanks to people’s generosity, my previous workbooks have covered their production costs, and it would be nice if this happened again.
Bob Williams