Values, Virtues, and Virtuosity
Finding your values, cultivating your character, and developing virtuosity in how you live your life with others
“Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson 1
In the organisational domain, many people still operate under the misapprehension that an organisation’s culture is its “shared values”.
That toxic myth was plucked out of thin air by McKinsey in 1980.2
Part of what’s made the myth so sticky for more than 40 years is that it plays on our intuitive grasp that a meaningful, authentic life depends on living our personal values.
You’ll know how powerful personal values can be if you’ve reflected on some of your key life experiences, discovered some of your personal values, and sought to bring these more consistently into your actions and interactions.3
The process of finding your values and cultivating them into virtues reflects Socrates’ famous insight: “The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.” 4
So, what might an examined life look like?
On the surface level, it’s quite possible to assert certain values, believe and espouse them with great conviction, but not actually live those values by enacting them as virtues in everyday action.
That’s the defining difference — values are espoused, virtues are in-use. 5
As Angela Duckworth, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Grit, explained in a recent interview:
“Character is the ways of thinking, acting, feeling, doing, and saying that benefit others and yourself that you can continue to cultivate your whole life, but they really are in action. So they’re not just thoughts you have, they’re not just beliefs, they’re enacted. Values are like the aspirational principles by which you would hope to live your life. You really can value kindness and not be kind. But you cannot have the character strength of kindness, the virtue of kindness, without actually doing kind acts.” 6
Cognitive science
The relationship between espoused values and enacted virtues has recently become more prominent in the field of cognitive science.
The first generation of cognitive science assumed that human reasoning and cognition was based on locally stored explicit symbols.7
Second generation cognitive science focused on neural networks, and saw human reasoning and cognition as based on distributed inexplicit and pre-symbolic representations.8
Third generation cognitive science seeks to address the role played by the human body, seeing cognition as inherently Embodied (i.e. not just inside the head), Embedded (i.e. causally dependent on the world outside the body), Extended (i.e. essentially involving other people/processes), and Enacted (i.e. involving active engagement with the world).
Due to these four attributes, it’s also known as "4E" cognitive science.9
How does this 4E understanding of cognition as inherently embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted help us to turn our values into virtues?
Well, if cognition is inherently enacted, the cultivation of values into virtues requires that we actively enact our values in our daily lives.
As Duckworth comments: “You cannot have the virtue of kindness, without actually doing kind acts”.
However, as Emerson observed, virtue or its lack is not just evident in our overt acts, it’s “emitted at every moment”.
Are there deeper ways of applying insights from 4E cognitive science to the value | virtue | virtuosity dynamic in our lives?
A useful resource here is the 4P framework of Professor John Vervaeke, which he developed to provide a practical overview and integration of 4E cognitive science.
The 4P framework highlights that human beings have four ways of knowing:
1) Propositional Knowing
This is belief-centric, arising in the form of “knowing that…<insert proposition>” — e.g. knowing that a cat is a mammal; knowing that Paris is the capital of France, knowing that you value kindness, etc.
In propositional knowing, memory is a set of facts you believe to be true.
2) Procedural Knowing
This is “knowing how” to do something — e.g. how to catch a ball, how to understand other people, how to be kind to others, etc.
In procedural knowing, memory is not about facts that are true or false, but about embodied skills, how apt they are, how well they fit the context.
3) Perspectival Knowing
This is the knowing you have because you’re a conscious being with a perspective on your context. Knowing what it’s like to be in a certain situation, including which skills to apply, and/or you need to acquire, and to what degree — such as knowing how to be kind in appropriate ways in this situation, which may not be appropriate ways of being kind in that situation. 10
In perspectival knowing, memory is about situational awareness — what’s in the foreground and what is in the background of your salience landscape.
4) Participatory Knowing
This is the deepest form of knowing and the most backgrounded in your salience landscape. It’s your sense of connectedness, co-identification, of being who you are in a given situation.
In participatory knowing, memory is about how you, your agency, and the arena relate to each other. It's about the identity you’re assuming, and the identities you’re assigning within the arena.
Vervaeke points out that being virtuous involves the deeper levels of Procedural, Perspectival, and Participatory knowing.
However, we live in a world obsessed with assimilating everything into Propositional knowing — forming concepts, developing theories, asserting belief systems, etc. 11
This propositional tyranny makes us prone to self-deception — fooling ourselves that just because we believe in kindness as a value, we’re being kind, even when we’re not.
Vervaeke describes Socrates’ examined life as one where we pay sufficient attention to the procedural, perspectival, and participatory levels, to reduce self-deception, and cultivate our values into virtues.
Social psychology
So 4E cognitive science can help inform our efforts to turn our values into virtues, but how do we build on that and achieve greater virtuosity in how we live our lives with others?
“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” — Steve Jobs 12
This famous quote from Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement speech highlights that to be a virtuoso in living your life, you need to love what you do.
But how do you find what you love to do?
The answer to that question turns out to be simple, but not easy.
It’s simple because the answer to loving what you do is found inside-out — by identifying your values, cultivating them into virtues, and bringing them more consistently into your actions and interactions.
It’s not easy because we’ve been deeply conditioned to believe that the answer to loving life is found outside-in — by looking out there, not in here.
In his 1976 book To Have or to Be, psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm highlights this inside-out versus outside-in dilemma by identifying two types of human needs — having needs and being needs.
We need to have food, water, oxygen, shelter, etc. These are genuine having needs that must be satisfied if we are to survive.
But in order to thrive, not just survive, we must also satisfy various being needs — such as being of value, being wise, being virtuous (or, a la Duckworth, being of good character).
However, as Fromm points out:
“Because the society we live in is devoted to acquiring property and making a profit, we rarely see any evidence of the being mode of existence and most people see the having mode as the most natural mode of existence, even the only acceptable way of life. All of which makes it especially difficult for people to comprehend the nature of the being mode, and even to understand that having is only one possible orientation. Nevertheless, these two concepts are rooted in human experience. Neither one should be, or can be, examined in an abstract, purely cerebral way; both are reflected in our daily life and must be dealt with concretely.” 13
The contemporary dominance of the having mode of existence over the being mode of existence means we easily and often get modally confused — seeking to satisfy being needs through the having mode.
For example:
Instead of being of value, we seek to have valuable things — houses, cars, boats, etc.
Instead of being wise, we seek to have propositional knowledge — buying lots of books, filling up our Kindles, collecting endless articles and papers, etc.
Instead of being virtuous, we have values that we espouse.
Having needs are satisfied outside-in — by finding, acquiring, and consuming what we need.
By contrast, being needs can only be satisfied inside out — by identifying the personal values that are important to us, and cultivating them into embodied and enacted virtues.
Humans are social beings, hence our values, virtues, and virtuosity aren’t cultivated in isolation.
A useful framework here is Self-Determination Theory (SDT), renowned in social psychology for having displaced “the dominant belief that the best way to get human beings to perform tasks is to reinforce their behaviour with rewards”. 14
I explored SDT in a recent article, so won’t go into detail here — other than highlighting the three being needs it identifies as essential to the intrinsic motivation at the heart of future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.15
Autonomy is experienced when we feel ourselves to be causal agents of our own lives, as opposed to feeling like we’re pawns in someone else’s game — as means to their ends.
We experience autonomy when we’re aware of, and have the freedom to act in accordance with, our values and cultivate these so they become virtues.
Competence is experienced when we’re mastering activities that matter to us as individuals, and co-create meaningful value with others.
We experience competence when we develop and deploy skills we find meaningful because they employ, enact, and embody our virtues, and develop our virtuosity.
Relatedness is experienced when we feel connected to others in ways that enable and encourage us to individually and collectively cultivate our virtues and combine our virtuosity with the virtuosity of others to co-create continuous new value together.
It’s by bringing autonomy, competence and relatedness to life in our organisations that we develop the individual and collective virtuosity needed to flourish in our increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.
Questions for reflection
How well do you know your own personal values? 16
How much attention do you give to bringing your own genuine personal values more consistently into your actions and interactions, so they become embodied virtues?
How are you cultivating meaningful virtuosity by developing and deploying your virtues (aka character strengths) in your actions and interactions?
How much, and how consistently, do you experience autonomy, competence and relatedness in your work in particular, and your life in general?
“Self-Reliance” Essays: First Series (1883) p59.
I lay out the backstory here: Toxic myth of ‘culture as shared values’.
I’ve previously described a simple but powerful way to get to grips with your own personal values here: The Real Value of Values.
“The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being”. ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ (ho de anexetastos bios ou biôtos anthrôpôi) In Plato’s Apology.
This distinction between espoused and in-use was a central theme in the work of Professor Chris Argyris of Harvard and Professor Donald Schön of MIT, which I described in this pervious article Walking the Talk.
Interview with Dr Michael Gervais on the Finding Mastery podcast channel 28 February 2022, at 01:00 - direct link here.
Phenomenology and the Third Generation of Cognitive Science: Towards a Cognitive Phenomenology of the Body — Shoji Nagataki (Chukyo University, Japan) and Satoru Hirose (Shokei Gakuin University, Japan) Human Studies, January 2007 p219.
Ibid — Phenomenology and 3rd Gen CogSci p220.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition — Oxford University Press (2018) p6.
For example it may be kinder sometimes to let someone struggle and develop their own competence than jump in and fix things for them.
This is also consistent with Dr Iain McGilchrist’s critique of the dominant left hemisphere way of attending to the world. In a previous post I described how McGilchrist sees the left hemisphere dealing with re-presentations such as schema, maps, and models, whilst the right hemisphere presences reality in much richer, broader, more meaningful ways.
Stanford University Commencement speech June 12, 2005.
To Have or to Be — Chapter 2 Intro (p24 in the Continuum Press edition of 1997).
According to the American Psychological Association (APA) in this 2017 article on 40 years of SDT.
I summarised SDT in this recent article on Humanising Organisations.
Ibid - The simple but deceptively powerful exercise I recommend for discovering your personal values is here: The Real Value of Values.