What is ‘value’ and why is it important?

By: Clare Morley

Value (noun) : “The regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.”

A few weeks ago, we spent some really interesting time together as a team considering the concept of value, and the discussions we had about it are still reverberating around inside my head as its application is significant, particularly as we work towards launching our new strategy in April.

But why do we, as the active partnership for Northumberland and Tyne & Wear, need to talk above value? With Rise being a strategic agency, working to effect system change and support partners to use physical activity in their work, it can sometimes be really difficult to determine whether we are making a difference or not. Meaningful impact often takes time to detect; we’re not talking about tangible deliverables, or “stuff”; we are focussed on developing relationships, trust and organisational change. How do you measure this? In Sport England’s recent paper People & Places: The Story of Doing It Differently, they succinctly articulate the issue: “A key challenge of taking a systemic approach is how you understand and show that valuable change is happening.”

We already know that the process of reducing physical inactivity is a complex one, as people exist within complex systems and have a multitude of influences on their lives. There is no silver bullet that will get people more active. And we know from a Human Learning Systems approach that there is no simple cause-and-effect relationship between inputs and outputs in a complex system, and so trying to measure value in a traditional sense of numbers and figures is disingenuous to the work being done.

Following some recommendations from some wonderful colleagues across the wider Active Partnership network, we struck up a discussion with Andrew Darnton, who has developed the ‘Revaluation’ methodology alongside Andrew Harrison. This is designed to measure the full value of social action in complex systems. The process is far more detailed than I can articulate here, but in essence, we spent some time together as a team considering ‘items of value’ that were identified in the stories we told each other about various pieces of work that we are engaged in; everything from how we delivered the first Virtual School Games last summer through to the story behind our rebranding to Rise.

What did we notice?

Well, in the sessions we had, it really didn’t feel like we were ‘evaluating’ in the traditional sense. This was our first foray into using Revaluation, and it felt very much like we were ‘socialising value’, trying to understand the value that we create so that we can communicate it to and with others. We should and will spend more time on the process to be able to dig deeper into the activities and explore more layers of the system, but perhaps an example is useful here to give a flavour of what we mean.

Active Hospitals

We’re excited to be working with Northumbria NHS in relation to an Active Hospitals pilot, where bringing physical activity into a number of care pathways within a secondary care setting is a key objective. Using the Revaluation approach, we considered the story so far of our journey as part of the Active Hospitals team, from bid development and submission, to the early steering groups that we are involved with.

The Revaluation approach has allowed us to understand that not only will there be some very visible, quantifiable value generated by the work (financial investment into the programme, opportunities to engage 10,000 staff and all the contacts they have with patients (and of course their own families), any changes in average lengths of stay in hospital, readmission rates etc.), but perhaps what was most fascinating, and more hidden when not using this approach, was the less visible, more qualitative value that the programme can generate: the capacity that can be generated by the work is significant – networks of clinicians and allied health professional connected in a different way through consideration of the role of physical activity; shared learning at a local, regional and national level; patients moving around on an active ward and not being in their pyjamas all day; a culture shift within the Trust so that physical activity is used to benefit all patients, going beyond just ‘treatment’; the hierarchy of the Trust understanding and backing the value of more active patients and their role in supporting that.

It really is these less visible elements that are sometimes missed, or not given the opportunity to be exposed, using traditional evaluation. Thinking about value in its broadest sense is therefore vital when really trying to understand “the importance, worth, or usefulness of something”, and for Rise as a strategic agency, this will be critical for us moving forward under our Rise Together strategy which launches in April.