What Value Cards builds on, and how the insights are made

Last updated 12 October 2026

Value Cards is a values exercise, not a test. This page says where the values come from, which published research the analysis builds on, how the insights are made in broad strokes, and what they are not, so that an HR partner, a manager, a developer or a therapist can judge the method for themselves. The exact weights, the wording of the deck and the way the written summary is composed are our own work and are not described here.

Where the values come from

The deck holds 55 values, from Curiosity and Courage to Fairness and Trustworthiness, chosen and illustrated for the printed Value Cards deck by Viktor Cessan. Sorting a deck of values into piles and choosing the few that matter most is an old and open method. Milton Rokeach asked people to rank values in the 1970s, and the Personal Values Card Sort by William Miller and colleagues at the University of New Mexico, which is in the public domain, uses the same movement of sorting cards into important and not important piles. Value Cards keeps that movement and adds a second sort, a choice of five, and the person's own words, because a card means what the person who chose it says it means.

The five groups the cards belong to, Exploration and Growth, Achievement and Drive, Community and Relationships, Security and Responsibility, and Meaning and Fulfillment, are our own lens. They are informed by Shalom Schwartz's theory of basic values, in which values form a circle and sit in broad regions such as openness to change, self-enhancement, self-transcendence and conservation, with values that oppose each other on opposite sides of the circle.

How the analysis is built

Every number a team sees is something a person can check by hand. The analysis counts, takes shares and uses one correlation, and it describes patterns between people without ever grading a person. Nobody is ranked, there is no most aligned person, and guesses are shown only as totals.

• Where the weight goes. Each pile a card ends in is a weight, and a person's orientation is the share of their weight that falls in each of the five groups. The team's is the average of its members.
• Spectrums. Six pairs of values that pull in opposite directions, such as change and continuity or direction and consensus. Each end has its own cards, a person's position is how much weight they put on one end against the other, and positions are read relative to each other, since the distance between two people matters more than where anyone stands. That way of reading a scale follows Erin Meyer's culture map, and the pairing of opposing values follows Schwartz.
• Alignment. How similarly two people sorted the whole deck, as a correlation between their two sorts, moved onto a scale where 50 is what two random sorts would give.
• Values across the team. Common ground, values held by one person only, contested values that matter most to some and not at all to others, and values nobody picked, all from counts of the piles.
• How working together feels. What each pair said about each other, averaged, placed next to how much the two share, so that pairs who differ and still find it easy, and pairs who share a lot and still find it hard, stand out.
• How well you know each other. The share of guesses that landed in a teammate's five, compared with chance, and the share of guesses that were the guesser's own values.
• Frictions. A friction one person names is held against the two maps, and the verdict weighs a handful of signals such as the distance between the two people on the spectrum in question and whether the other person holds the value named. The people's own answers sit next to the verdict and never change it.
• The summary. Written from the computed facts, either by rules we wrote or, when the organizer allows it, by a language model that receives the facts with people as codes rather than names. It describes patterns and ends with questions, and it can be wrong.

On top of these open methods sits our own behavioural analysis, the choice and weighting of cards on each spectrum, the verdicts, the texts that read a position in words and the way the summary is composed. That part is Value Cards' own intellectual property and is not published.

The research we build on

None of this research is licensed, proprietary or ours. We cite it because the exercise and the analysis are informed by it, not because any of these authors endorse Value Cards. Where a journal article has a DOI, the link opens it at the publisher, and many are also free to read through the authors' pages or open repositories.

1. Values as a structure. Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 1–65. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60281-6. And the open access overview: Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An overview of the Schwartz theory of basic values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1). doi:10.9707/2307-0919.1116. What we take from it: values can be grouped, and some groups oppose each other, which is the idea behind the five groups and the spectrums.
2. Ranking and sorting values. Rokeach, M. (1973). The Nature of Human Values. Free Press. Miller, W. R., C'de Baca, J., Matthews, D. B., & Wilbourne, P. L. (2001). Personal Values Card Sort. University of New Mexico, public domain. What we take from it: sorting a deck into piles and choosing the few that matter most is a method people understand at once and answer honestly.
3. Reading positions as distances. Meyer, E. (2014). The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business. PublicAffairs. What we take from it: on a scale, the gap between two people explains more than where either stands, and each end of a scale protects something.
4. Value congruence at work. Kristof-Brown, A. L., Zimmerman, R. D., & Johnson, E. C. (2005). Consequences of individuals' fit at work: A meta-analysis of person–job, person–organization, person–group, and person–supervisor fit. Personnel Psychology, 58(2), 281–342. doi:10.1111/j.1744-6570.2005.00672.x. Edwards, J. R., & Cable, D. M. (2009). The value of value congruence. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(3), 654–677. doi:10.1037/a0014891. What we take from it: shared values go with trust and ease of working together, partly because people communicate more and predict each other better, which is why alignment is placed next to how working together feels.
5. Differences in teams. Jehn, K. A., Northcraft, G. B., & Neale, M. A. (1999). Why differences make a difference: A field study of diversity, conflict, and performance in workgroups. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(4), 741–763. doi:10.2307/2667054. Harrison, D. A., Price, K. H., & Bell, M. P. (1998). Beyond relational demography: Time and the effects of surface- and deep-level diversity on work group cohesion. Academy of Management Journal, 41(1), 96–107. doi:10.2307/256901. What we take from it: differences in values are the differences that matter most over time, and they are easier to work with when they are visible and talked about.
6. Seeing yourself and others. Vazire, S. (2010). Who knows what about a person? The self–other knowledge asymmetry (SOKA) model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(2), 281–300. doi:10.1037/a0017908. Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The "false consensus effect": An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13(3), 279–301. doi:10.1016/0022-1031(77)90049-X. Kenny, D. A. (1994). Interpersonal Perception: A Social Relations Analysis. Guilford. What we take from it: people see some things in others better than in themselves, and tend to assume others share their own values, which is why the guesses are compared with chance and with the guesser's own five.
7. Talking about hard things. Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. doi:10.2307/2666999. What we take from it: a friction is easier to name when the setting is safe, which is why frictions are shown only to the people their author chose and why the workshop opens with ground rules.
8. From insight to action. Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493–503. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.54.7.493. What we take from it: an agreement specific enough to notice whether you kept it is far more likely to be kept, which is how the workshop asks for agreements.
9. Values over time. Bardi, A., & Goodwin, R. (2011). The dual route to value change: Individual processes and cultural moderators. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 42(2), 271–287. doi:10.1177/0022022110396916. What we take from it: values are stable but not static, which is why a team or a client can map again after a few months and see what moved.

What this is not

Value Cards is not a validated psychometric instrument and has no norms. The sort is a snapshot of how a person felt on one day, often in a language that is not their first, and the groups come from a handful of people, so one sort can move a team average. The groups and spectrums are lenses chosen by the deck's author, not personality types, and a position on a spectrum is a tendency rather than a label. The analysis must never be used to select, rank or rate people, for example in hiring, and a supported friction still has to be talked about by the people involved.

Further reading

Viktor Cessan writes about teams, values and facilitation at viktorcessan.com, where the printed deck and the facilitation guide that the exercise grew from are also described. For how your data is handled, read the privacy policy. Customers find a fuller version of this page inside the app, under Sources and method.