I've been thinking lately that "overly specific values weaken a team — what matters is leaving space." I want to try putting that into words.
Values only work when they're shared
When I ask myself why we share values in the first place, it comes down to one thing: to move in step with someone else.
Take my own household as an example. My wife and I have almost opposite temperaments — I want to learn as much as possible, embrace failure, and welcome change, while she prefers to avoid unnecessary mistakes and sees no need for change when things are already good. And yet somehow we've been walking the same path for nearly ten years. The reason, I think, is that we share a single strong value at the top: "we love our family and don't want to lose it." Because that top-level value is fixed for both of us, we have the space to accept each other's flaws and the trust to point them out without fear. That's what moving in step with someone really means, I think.
The same is true in a company. My co-founder ishkawa and I have been working together for less than two years at 10X, but personally I feel things have been going pretty well. There are many factors, but the number one reason is probably that we placed "make what people want" as the shared value at the center of everything.
Without space, you collide
On the other hand, I've also experienced leaving communities because of values clashes.
The clearest example: I once made the decision to leave a company because my values didn't align with the owner of the product I was working on.
The owner and I shared values like "we want to succeed as a business" and "business is built on complex tradeoffs and is extremely difficult." But then there was this:
Me: "User value is the top priority." The owner: "Realizing the vision and hitting the business plan is the top priority."
The gap between these irreconcilable values created enormous frustration on both sides. How we communicated, how development progressed, how we set issue priorities — one thing after another felt wrong, and we kept clashing.
Looking back, I feel my own immaturity in it, and when I reflect on "what was missing," my answer is: space. The problems we faced had infinite possible framings and solutions. If we'd both held more space around what "business success" actually required, we wouldn't have collided — we'd have had richer, more sophisticated discussions about the problems and possible solutions.
Most of the knowledge and writing that circulates in the world is about things that worked. Failure stories like this rarely surface. I honestly didn't want to write this. I don't want to fail. But the insight — that even when top-level values are shared, lacking space leads to collision — came only from this failure.
Where to hold the space
My success story: sharing a top-level value with my family while maintaining enough space. My failure story: sharing values with a former colleague but losing the space.
So, applying those lessons — where should the space be held? I've been arriving at an answer, slowly. It comes down to: hold WHY much more firmly than before, and make WHAT and HOW vast open space.
When it comes to concrete action plans — what to do, how to do it — I've naturally become able to hold the posture of:
- "I'm not at my best here."
- "Taking in a different angle can produce a better approach."
The negative image I used to associate with disagreement has faded. The experience of building 10X — a box aiming for inventions nobody has tried, doing zero-to-one with no models to copy — combined with the earlier failure, has promoted a real shift in mindset.
On these things, I've abandoned the arrogance of thinking "I understand this best, my way is correct." What matters is that the problem gets solved. The more people moving toward the right answer, the better the result. That's where I am now. Leave space.
