How to use the Values Clarification Tool

The intent of a value-sensitive humanitarian innovation approach is to support “humanitarian innovators and their partners to flag, track, and account for ethical considerations associated with an ICT innovation” (Smith et al, forthcoming).

The Values Clarification Tool supports a value-sensitive approach to humanitarian innovation. The tool has three stages:

1. Identify the values that matter to your organisation or project.
2. Think about how those values interact, and prioritise several to develop into ‘value statements’.
3. Describe in a ‘value statement’ why each of your values is important, and how you will put them into practice. This process helps move the abstract value into something that is more concrete and tangible.

Through the Values Clarification Tool, innovators are able to reflect on the values they want to uphold in their project. To complement the tool, and to improve the resulting discussions, users should consider bringing in other resources alongside, such as guidance documents from your own organisation, or normative guidance specific to your domain of innovation (for example, around digital innovations).

To illustrate the process, we have created a hypothetical case study below (based on values identified by Earney and Krishnan in their blog on ‘The art of values-based innovation in humanitarian action’):

An innovation team has come together to develop a new project. As they get started, they employ the values clarification tool. Through discussion, the group selects three values that they see as central to their project: inclusion, collaboration and participation. Rather than stopping there, the tool then leads them to think through how these values can be enacted. After an extended discussion and many drafts, they settle on three statements. To enact inclusion, they express they will seek to “recognise power structures and to reimagine an inclusive future.” To enact collaboration, they state their goal as aiming to create meaningful and mutually beneficial collaborations with their partners. Finally, for participation, they identify a central concern as being committed to “question whose voices we value and why.” (Earney and Krishnan, 2019)

An innovation team has come together to develop a new project. As they get started, they employ the values clarification tool. Through discussion, the group selects three values that they see as central to their project: inclusion, collaboration and participation. Rather than stopping there, the tool then leads them to think through how these values can be integrated throughout their work. After an extended discussion and many drafts, they settle on three statements. To embody inclusion, they express they will seek to “recognise power structures and to reimagine an inclusive future.” To facilitate collaboration, they state their goal as aiming to create meaningful and mutually beneficial collaborations with their partners. Finally, for participation, they commit to consistently questioning “whose voices we value and why.” From these statements, they can then identify key activities to translate these values into actions.

Table 5: An example of key values and how they could be integrated in an innovation project, drawing from Earney and Krishnan