Idea → Value Course
A practical system for navigating the messy middle of work — helping ideas move through investment, activity, and creative action to become real value.
Idea → Value Course
A system for seeing and navigating the messy middle of work.
Every organisation is full of ideas.
Ideas driven by strategy, demand, pressure, creative insight and opportunity.
Ideas for products, services, improvements, and change.
But ideas do not become valuable because they are clever.
They become valuable — or costly — in the messy middle:
the space between intention and outcome, where investment is made, activity expands, creativity is applied (or constrained), and learning either happens or does not.
Idea → Value is a system for making that middle visible.
So work leads somewhere worth going.
Where Idea → Value Sits in the Cultivated System
Cultivated’s work is built as a layered system for understanding how organisations move and create value.
Map → Physics → Wiring → Engine → Flywheel
Map — Releasing Agility
How organisations orient themselves: current reality, painted picture, strategy and direction of travel.
Physics — Idea → Value
How ideas become realised value — and where friction accumulates.
Wiring — Communication
How meaning, intent, and decisions travel through people and systems.
Engine — Creativity
How insight, reframing, and invention generate new possibilities.
Flywheel — Learning
How behaviour change, feedback, and memory compound advantage over time.
Idea → Value sits at the centre of this stack.
It explains the mechanics of work itself
—the forces, friction and creative action between idea and valuable outcome.
What Idea → Value Is
Idea → Value is not a leadership programme.
It is not a delivery methodology.
It is not a productivity system.
It is not a delivery framework
It is a sensemaking system for work.
It is a way of seeing how ideas flow to value.
It helps you see:
- where ideas enter your organisation
- how investment turns into activity
- why teams stay busy but progress feels unclear
- where cost accumulates without value increasing
- how communication, creativity, and learning shape outcomes
It provides a shared language for understanding work
— and 26 guiding principles for seeing, and shaping, what happens between idea and value.
The Core Flow
At the heart of the system is a simple truth:
Everything between idea and value is cost
— unless deliberately shaped.
The flow is explicit:
Idea → Investment → Activity Sets → Creative Action → Ship → Value
Most organisations focus on single parts of this path.
Idea → Value focuses on the full journey, doubling down on the middle
— where work actually lives.
Value can appear as:
- external financial outcomes (revenue, customers, impact)
- internal enablement (capability, platforms, stability, compliance)
- cost reduction
- learning and strategic optionality
The Six Lenses
The course is organised around six connected lenses.
Together, they form a way of seeing and intervening in real work.
1. Seeing the Whole
Understanding value, cost, and systems.
Connecting the future vision with the activity to achieve it.
You learn to see work as a system rather than a queue of tasks.
Everything is ultimately connected.
2. Clarity
Deciding what deserves attention
You learn to interpret demand, prioritise deliberately, and avoid overload.
3. Alignment
Connecting investment, activity, and value
You learn to translate strategy into funded, aligned action.
This is where tactics bring the strategy to life.
4. Creative Action
Creative action under constraint
You learn how delivery approaches shape learning and creativity.
5. Measurement
Seeing progress honestly
You learn to distinguish activity from value and avoid comforting illusions and watermelon reporting.
6. Improvement
Learning as a way of working
You learn how organisations compound advantage through behaviour change.
These lenses are not a framework to memorise.
They are a set of ways to notice, adjust, and learn.
What You Receive
The course is available in two ways:
The Full System
- 4.5 hours of calm, reflective video teaching
- The complete Idea → Value guidebook with models, prompts, and space to think
- Designed to be applied directly to real work
The Workbook
- The complete Idea → Value guidebook with models, prompts, and space to think
- A practical tool for making sense of investment, activity, and outcomes
Both are designed to be returned to
— not completed once and forgotten.
→ Enrol in the full video course
→ Get the workbook on its own
Who This Is For
Idea → Value is for people inside organisations who care about how work actually works.
It is useful if you:
- work with ideas that must become outcomes
- feel busy but unclear whether anything meaningful is moving
- want better conversations about priorities and value
- care about making work calmer, clearer, and more humane
You do not need a leadership title.
You do not need permission.
You need work that matters
— and a desire to understand how it becomes real.
Why This Exists
Idea → Value emerged from years of organisational work.
The pattern was consistent:
- cost accumulating quietly
- effort dissipating in the middle
- creativity constrained by process
- learning arriving too late
This system names that reality and offers a way through it.
Most people begin by applying it to a single piece of real work.
Clarity compounds from there.
Paths into the System
- Full Course (video + workbook)
- Workbook only
Start where you are.
Use what is useful.
Let clarity compound.
→ Enrol in the full video course
→ Get the workbook on its own
In Essence
Idea → Value helps you:
- see the messy middle of work clearly
- shape investment, activity, and action deliberately
- use communication, creativity, and learning intelligently
- turn organisational ideas into real-world value
Placement in the Cultivated Library
This work sits within the Leadership & Work in Practice collection.
