The National Space Centre in Leicester set out to develop a new set of values and refresh its mission statement so that it reflected what the organisation had become. The project put employee stories at its heart. One hundred people shared what they were most proud of since joining, and from those stories came a set of values, and a mission, that still guide the centre today.
The National Space Centre in Leicester is one of the country's best loved science attractions, home to the UK's largest planetarium and a long-standing champion of space science and education. When Kersti Fourcin, then Head of Communications, brought me in, the organisation was ready to develop a new set of values and to refresh its mission statement so that it reflected the centre as it had become.
Values work is some of my favourite work. Done well, a set of values reads as a true reflection of what the people inside an organisation already believe and do at their best. That was the brief here: find the values already alive across the National Space Centre, and give them words that everyone could recognise.
I wanted the values to come from the people, so I built the whole approach around storytelling. I designed an A3 storytelling worksheet and structured it around the hero's journey, the classic story shape that sits underneath so many of the tales we tell. It gave people a simple, familiar frame for sharing a real experience from their time at the centre.
We ran the activity across ten workshops with employees from every part of the organisation. I have a fond memory of introducing the exercise at the start of each session with the soundtrack to The Lion King playing in the background. It set an inspirational tone and gave people permission to think big about their own stories. Everyone answered one simple question: what were they most proud of since joining the National Space Centre?
What followed was entertaining and moving in equal measure, a wide variety of stories from right across the centre, from the planetarium to the education teams to the people who welcome visitors through the door. In all, one hundred employees shared their stories.
Then the analysis began. Working closely with Kersti and her team, we used a simple framework to read every worksheet and distil each story down to its essence, drawing out the purpose, the values, and the themes that ran through all of them. We looked beyond the stories too, at customer feedback, surveys, visitor reviews, and the milestones of the centre and its strands such as the National Space Academy and NSC Creative.
A clear and simple picture emerged from all those stories. What makes the National Space Centre so special is that it brings space to everyone: the young families and school children, the scientists and enthusiasts, the local communities, students, artists, and grandparents who all find something there. That insight became the mission the team settled on, Space for Everyone.
The values we developed are still in use to this day, which is the outcome I care about most. Some years on, and after everything the sector lived through during the pandemic, Space for Everyone now sits front and centre of the National Space Centre's twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations, both literally and figuratively. It is very satisfying to see work like this still carrying weight so long after the workshops finished.
This project stays with me as one of my favourites over the years. It is a reminder that the strongest values already live inside an organisation, waiting to be found. When you gather enough honest stories and listen carefully to what people are proud of, the values are there in the room, ready to be named.
The storytelling did the heavy lifting. By giving people the hero's journey as a frame, a single question to answer, and a bit of theatre to set the tone, we made it easy for a hundred colleagues to contribute something real. The rigour came in the analysis, turning a hundred individual stories into a shared set of values and a mission that could speak for the whole organisation.
Most work like this starts with a 30-minute call to understand the team, the context, and what good would look like. From there we agree the shape of the work together.
