A framework for converting stated values into working principles, using the Cost Test: if holding a value has never cost you anything, it is a preference wearing a value’s clothes. Explained in full below, and free to download, keep and teach from.
Almost every organisation and almost every graduate can produce a list of values in about four minutes. Integrity. Innovation. Respect. The list is produced quickly because nothing is at stake in producing it, and that is precisely the problem. A value that costs nothing to hold is not doing any work.
This framework exists to close the gap between what a person says they believe and what they can be observed to do under pressure. It does that by refusing to accept a value in its abstract form and forcing it down into a principle, which is a sentence specific enough that following it could plausibly lose you a client, a job, a grade, or an argument you wanted to win.
Students use it in the first weeks of a personal branding course, before any writing about themselves begins, because a brand statement built on unexamined values collapses the moment anyone asks a follow up question. Teams use it to write norms that actually resolve disputes rather than decorating a wall.
If holding a value has never cost you anything, it is a preference wearing a value’s clothes.
Speed is the point. Polish arrives later and its main function at this stage is concealment. A rough list of ten to fifteen words is more useful than a considered list of four, because the ones you would have edited out are usually the ones with something underneath them.
Take each value and ask what holding it has actually cost. Not what it could cost in principle, but a specific occasion on which it cost you something real. A value that survives this question stays. A value that produces only hypotheticals is a preference, and preferences are fine, they simply are not load bearing.
A value is a noun and a principle is a sentence. Honesty becomes something closer to a client hears the problem from me before they hear it from anyone else. The test of a good conversion is whether the sentence could be broken. If it cannot be broken, it is not a principle, it is a description.
Take a decision you are currently avoiding and run it through the principles. A working set of principles will produce an answer, and often an uncomfortable one. A set that produces no answer is not finished.
Everyone ranks independently, then all rankings are revealed at once, then the disagreements are stress tested rather than smoothed over. The disagreement is the useful part of the exercise. Norms written from the surviving principles hold, because the objections were raised before the writing rather than after it.
Value: Respect
The Cost TestWhat has respect cost me? Nothing I can name. It has never once made me do something I did not want to do.
The value underneath itOn reflection, the thing being protected was not respect in the abstract. It was that people find out where they stand from me directly.
AfterPrinciple: Anyone whose work I am judging hears my assessment from me, in person, before it is recorded anywhere.
Does it cost?Yes. It costs an uncomfortable twenty minutes every time, and it removes the option of hiding behind a written form. That is how you know it is a principle.
This is the instrument for the opening weeks, and it feeds the Self Reflection assignment directly. The principles you produce here become the evidence layer under your brand statement. Bring the rough list to the session rather than a polished one, because the workshop is built on the disagreements.
Nothing here needs a classroom. Ninety minutes and a willingness to answer the cost question honestly is the whole requirement. If it is useful, the natural next step is the Mission and Vision Framework, which takes the principles you just wrote and turns them outward into a statement about who you serve.
The worksheet above is yours with no conditions attached. If an annotated edition would help, the one with a completed example in every field and the notes on where people get stuck, that is what this is for.
One message per instrument, nothing else. Students in the class do not need this, the annotated version is handed out in the session.
Everything here is original teaching material developed for university courses and corporate training in Seoul. Use it, adapt it, teach from it. When quoting or summarising, cite Matthew Clement, CareerComms, and link this page.
If it is useful in your classroom, it has done its job.