Case story
"We haven’t scaled it back. We’ve woven it in further."
How Scouterna built Point of Value methodology deeper into a leadership programme it has run for twenty years.
Scouterna’s Värdebaserat ledarskap — Value-Based Leadership — is an advanced programme for young leaders aged 20 to 25 who already hold active leadership roles. It runs as a process over roughly ten months, going far deeper than the one- or two-day foundation courses most organisations offer.Its participants are strikingly varied: scout leaders running local groups, organisers of large national and international events, student union chairs, and young leaders from across civil society. What they share is the wish to grow as leaders — and a programme built on understanding their own values.
A programme whose entire purpose is values needs more than discussion. It needs a way to make values concrete — to help young leaders put their own, personal values into words, and work with them actively rather than abstractly.
That was the gap the Point of Value methodology was brought in to fill. Scouterna already worked with tools for behaviour; what they wanted was a way to work, just as concretely, with personal values — as a complement to everything else in the programme.
Over twenty years, through more than one revision of the programme, Scouterna has done the opposite of trimming it. They’ve built it in deeper. Imse Spragg Nilsson, who runs the programme, explains why — in her own words.
In conversation with Imse Spragg Nilsson
How does the Point of Value methodology sit within the programme?
It runs through the programme as a recurring thread rather than a single session. Participants work with a value language and, through Values Online, build a meaning map that sets out their core personal values in black and white. What makes it land is that the tool forces choices — rather than letting someone pick three values they like the sound of, it sets values against one another and asks which matters more.
“That’s what’s so good about the tool — it forces choices. When values are set against each other, the result isn’t always what you expected.”
Has anything about how participants respond surprised you?
They’re almost surprised themselves by how much they recognise themselves once the meaning map is in front of them — and sometimes surprised by which values reached their top ten. If we’d just handed them a word list and said ‘pick your top three’, it wouldn’t be the same.
I think they become wiser about themselves. They become more secure in who they are, what they value, and why they want to lead in a particular way. That security has a social dimension too. Participants come to understand not only their own values, but why someone else leads differently — and that neither way is better. It is the foundation of leading authentically, and of being followed.
What changes in how these young people lead?
The methodology facilitates a deep discovery path where the leaders’ personal values come to life through storytelling. What changes is simple and human: they become wiser about themselves. More secure in who they are, what they value, and why they want to lead in a particular way. And they can put it in relation to others — they understand why they do things one way and someone else does it differently, and that neither is better.
“If something matters to me, it needs to run through my leadership. That makes me more authentic — and makes it easier for others to follow me.”
Why build it in further, rather than scale it back?
Because you gain from talking about your personal values even more — especially in a programme whose whole purpose is values. It’s not something you discover overnight. It’s a process that takes time.
​What would you tell a peer at another organisation running a values-based programme?
That the Point of Value methodology has given us a simple tool and process for working with personal values. Easy to use, and it has added to the quality and the calibre of the programme.
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One moment from a recent graduation captured what the work is for. A participant read a poem she had written about keeping her values on a keyring in her pocket — where they press against her, so that she is constantly reminded of them. For the programme team, it expressed exactly what the work is for: values not as something assumed, but as something carried, noticed, and returned to.​
What isn't obvious from the outside
There is one thing, she adds, that is hard to see from the outside — and that has mattered over eight years of working together: the people behind the methodology, and their willingness to adapt it to her context.
"It’s one thing to have a tool that works a certain way, and another to actually make it work within the framework I have."