The Values Auction

Teams are given a fixed number of tokens and bid in a live auction for working principles — 'we ship fast', 'we never miss a deadline', 'we always say no to work we cannot do well'. There are deliberately not enough tokens. The arguments inside each team, before the bidding, are the entire activity.

What it is good for

• Leadership practiceGiving people a low-stakes place to direct, delegate and decide.
• CommunicationPractising clear hand-offs, active listening and saying the hard thing early.
• Trust & safetyLowering the cost of admitting a mistake or asking for help.
• InclusionDesigning participation so the loudest voice does not set the pace.

What you need

• A list of twenty candidate values or working principles
• Fake bidding tokens

The run sheet

1. Write twenty genuinely competing items (prep)

   The list must contain real trade-offs — speed against quality, autonomy against consistency, growth against focus. Twenty pleasant things nobody disagrees with produces a pleasant hour and no insight.

2. Teams and budgets (10 min)

   Teams of four to six. Each gets tokens worth about a third of what buying everything would cost. Ten minutes to agree a bidding strategy before the auction opens.

3. Run the auction (30 min)

   Live, out loud, one item at a time, in a random order. Facilitator as auctioneer. Items go to the highest bidder and then they are gone.

4. The reckoning (15 min)

   Each team presents what they bought, what they lost, and what their first three purchases say about them.

5. Compare to the real thing (15 min)

   Put the company's actual stated values on the screen next to what the room bought. The gap is the conversation you came for, and it is usually a quiet few minutes.

Facilitator notes

• Scarcity is the mechanism. If every team can afford most of the list, you have built a wish list, not a values exercise.
• The pre-auction strategy discussion is where the real content is. Give it the full ten minutes and listen in on at least two teams.
• Leadership teams should run this with their own published values in the list, unlabelled, and see whether anyone bids.

Debrief questions

Ask these immediately afterwards, not next week. Fifteen minutes of these is what turns the activity into something the team refers back to — see the debrief guide.

1. What did your team give up first, and was that an accident or a decision?
2. Where does our actual behaviour match what the room bought, and where does it not?
3. Which item would you spend everything on if we ran it again?

Variations