Core Values and Proposition Workshop
Work through this live, in the room. It carries the whole session: the run sheet, the values exercise, the strategic sweet spot, the audience work and the proposition draft. Run it after the strategic goals workshop, as the final work of Phase 1.
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Purpose of the Session
The session uncovers three things that already exist inside the business but have probably never been said out loud together: what the company genuinely values, what it could become exceptional at, and who specifically needs that.
Who Is in the Room
This is usually a wider room than the strategic goals workshop. Bring the Growth Lab Team together with the additional people needed for the proposition work: senior leaders and marketers who understand the company, its strongest work and the language its customers actually use. We usually call them the proposition team.
Give everyone enough notice. You want the right people in the room rather than the available ones.
What the Session Produces
- The company’s core values, written as behavioural principles
- The strategic sweet spot, where passion, capability and the economic engine overlap
- A defined audience and anti-audience
- A draft proposition, ready to be substantiated and tested
Facilitator tip. The work of this session is discovery, not invention.
You are not trying to write something impressive. You are identifying claims already supported by how the company works and the results it has produced. A proposition without evidence is difficult to defend. One grounded in demonstrated strengths gives the market a credible reason to believe it.
Workshop principles. Work from evidence, not aspiration. Let people be specific: “honesty” tells you very little, a story about a moment tells you everything. Make sure the quieter people are heard. Aim for true rather than clever, because the right words usually sound obvious once someone has said them.
A Note on Running This Yourself
When we facilitate this process, somebody from outside the business runs the room, and the practical advantage is independence. Somebody must manage airtime, challenge early consensus and prevent seniority from determining the answer. An internal chair can do this, but some interventions are harder when the chair remains part of the company’s hierarchy after the session.
You can run this session yourself. Go in knowing what you might come across.
If You Are Running It Internally
- Give the chair’s role to whoever is least invested in the outcome
- The founder participates as a contributor, not as the chair
- When someone offers something tentative and is talked over, come back to them: you seemed to have more to say on that
- Where the room needs to choose between options, have people write privately or vote with eyes closed. Visible agreement from the most senior person ends the conversation
- Do not rush to fill every silence. Give people time to formulate their contribution
More on the process. The Foundation, Values, included in this module, shows the deeper process we use when we facilitate these sessions ourselves. Run the steps in this pack, and read The Proposition Formula by Felix Velarde and Michael Nutley for the full method. If your team has tools of its own that work well, bring them: this pack is a route through the day rather than the only one.
Run Sheet
Everybody contributes to every step. The chair owns the process. When we run this work with clients we protect a full day; internally you may prefer one session or two. Either way, give the conversations enough room to get past the first plausible answers.
| 1 | Set the context | Chair | |
| 2 | Core values discovery | Everyone | |
| 3 | Turn the values into behaviour | Everyone | |
| 4 | Strategic sweet spot | Everyone | |
| 5 | Audience, moment of receptivity and anti-audience | Everyone | |
| 6 | Draft the magnetic proposition | Everyone | |
| 7 | Pressure-test the draft | Everyone |
What People Bring
One real moment from their working life when something crossed a line, or when somebody protected a principle even though it cost them. Something they can still picture clearly.
Three pieces of work from the past two years that show the company at its best, and the sentence the company currently uses to describe itself. The version actually in circulation, not the improved one nobody has written yet.
Everyone should read the two extracts from The Proposition Formula before the session. Nobody needs to prepare a list of values: the session uncovers those together.
Core Values DiscoveryEveryone
Real values emerge from moments where something crossed a line. Ask each member to reflect on a situation in their professional life where something was clearly wrong: a customer who behaved in a way the team could not accept, a project that moved in a direction they could not support, a leadership decision that violated personal principles.
Go round the room one person at a time. Collect, do not debate. Nobody evaluates anything yet. For each story ask what happened, why the situation felt unacceptable, and what principle was violated or needed to be protected. Then write the principle in one sentence.
Facilitator note. The word people reach for first is usually too broad. “Honesty” might mean I do not lie, or it might mean I will choose the uncomfortable truth over the comfortable one every time. Those are very different companies.
So push. Ask what the word means for that specific person, in that specific situation. The precision is the point. Expect two or three people to describe completely different situations and arrive at the same underlying principle. That is what you are looking for: a value nobody agreed in advance, that was already operating.
Turn the Values Into BehaviourEveryone
You should now have a collection of candidate values on the wall. This step turns them into something the company can actually use. For each candidate ask what behaviour it requires, what behaviour would breach it, and how it would influence a difficult decision.
Rewrite each one as a behavioural principle: a sentence describing what people here actually do.
Value word: Integrity. Behavioural principle: We tell customers the truth, even when the message is uncomfortable.
Candidates, Written as Behavioural Principles
Choosing the final set. You will have more candidates on the board than the company can use. Narrow in two passes: first agree a shortlist the room recognises, then choose the final set from that. Aim for three or four. More than that makes them harder to remember and use.
Do the choosing privately, written or by a blind vote with eyes closed. If people can see which way the founder is voting, you will get consensus rather than truth.
Facilitator note. Watch for the value that makes the room slightly uncomfortable. It is usually the real one. Comfortable values are comfortable because they exclude nobody, which is precisely why they are useless.
Strategic Sweet SpotEveryone
Work through each circle with the evidence in front of you: the three pieces of work the founder brought, and anything else the room wants to put on the table. Where all three overlap is the strategic sweet spot.
How Specific Should It Be?
Most companies describe themselves by the category they sit in. A sweet spot is narrower than a category, and the difference is what makes it useful.
- digital agency
- management consultancy
- marketing firm
- repositioning founder-led professional services firms
- helping mid-sized organisations navigate digital transformation
- scaling challenger brands in regulated markets
Facilitator note. The second circle is where the room will struggle, because a genuine capability feels ordinary from the inside. It is simply how these people work.
So do not ask what the company is good at. Ask what it did on its three best projects that another company probably would not have done. The answer is usually a way of approaching a problem rather than a service on the list.
Watch for the room describing itself by service category: marketing, consulting, engineering, design. Those are labels. They say what industry you are in, not why anyone should choose you within it.
Audience, Moment of Receptivity and Anti-AudienceEveryone
Step 1 · Your Best Customer Relationships
Discuss the three strongest customer relationships of the last two years. Why did they choose us? What problem were they actually trying to solve when they came looking? Why did the relationship work as well as it did? Look for the pattern rather than the individual answers.
Step 2 · When They Came Looking
A useful question, and one most companies have never asked: when do our best customers realise they need help?
Very few buying decisions begin with a website. They begin when something in the customer’s world stops working: growth stalls, a system starts breaking under volume, a supplier disappoints, a competitor changes the market, leadership realises the strategy is no longer working. Write down the situations that bring your best customers to the point of looking. This is the moment your proposition has to speak to.
Step 3 · Your Most Difficult Relationships
Now the opposite. What created the friction? What expectations were misaligned from the start? What kind of work did they actually want?
Step 4 · Define the Anti-Audience
Be specific. Not “customers who are not a good fit”, but the actual kind of customer who should look at this company and conclude it is not for them.
Facilitator note. Do not turn this into a list of customers people dislike. Look for recurring needs, expectations or ways of buying that pull the work away from the company’s strengths or leave the relationship unproductive for both sides.
The difficulty is rarely identification. It is acting on it. Expect someone to defend a customer who clearly belongs on this list, usually on the grounds of revenue. That conversation is the useful part of the exercise.
Draft Your Magnetic PropositionEveryone
A sentence that lets the right customer recognise themselves. Not a sentence that appeals to everyone: the broader it gets, the less it reads like an answer to anything.
A Structure to Start From
Then break it. Help is a soft word: it makes the company sound secondary to somebody else’s plan. The strongest propositions rarely keep this shape. Use the structure to name the customer and the situation, not to produce the final sentence.
Generate before you evaluate. Get a wide range of candidates down before evaluating any of them. This feels inefficient and it is not. If the room evaluates as it goes, every suggestion has to survive, and people stop offering anything that might not. Volume takes the pressure off any single idea. Candidates can be odd, wrong, or half-finished. Only then start narrowing.
Facilitator note. Keep protecting tentative contributions. When a useful phrase arrives, stop the room and ask for it again. The right line is easy to miss precisely because it does not sound clever: it sounds obvious, which is what you want.
Pressure-Test the DraftEveryone
Before anyone commits, put the strongest candidates through these questions.
- Would customers immediately understand what makes us distinctive?
- Can we substantiate the claim with evidence from work we have already done?
- Would the right customer recognise their own situation in it?
- Would the wrong customer realise this is not for them?
- Could a close competitor not use the same words with equal credibility?
- Could we still say this in three years?
Say it out loud. A strong proposition should be simple enough to say in a short conversation. Ask somebody to imagine they are sitting next to a stranger on a flight who asks what the company does, and to answer using the proposition, in a sentence or two. If they add a preamble, explain the words, or quietly reach for the old description instead, the proposition is not finished.
The one that matters most. Does the draft make a real choice? If it feels completely safe to everyone, ask what it commits the company to and what it rules out. If the proposition makes no claim that can be challenged, it may not yet be distinctive enough.
Workshop Outcome
By the end of the session you should have:
- Three or four core values, written as behavioural principles
- A defined strategic sweet spot
- A clear audience and anti-audience
- A draft proposition, ready to be substantiated and tested
Together with your Annapurna Vision, these form the strategic foundation of the business: where it is going, what it stands for, and the position it intends to hold. In Phase 2, the Growth Lab Team uses that foundation to build the Strategy Map.
Keep this page as the Growth Lab Team’s record of the workshop, and visible during meetings as a strategic reference point.
This pack draws on exclusive insights from The Proposition Formula by Felix Velarde and Michael Nutley. Read the book for the complete method: substantiating a proposition, testing it, launching it and keeping it working.
