Winnow makes you choose. Sort every value into piles, cut to ten, rank five. Eight minutes, and considerably more honest than the exercise where you pick from a list.
No account. No email. Nothing leaves your browser.
Deciding for myself
Being deeply known
Having control over others
Having direction and meaning
Asking someone what they value produces a list of nice things. Asking them to give values up produces the truth.
Everyone says they value honesty, family, and growth. Of course they do — nothing was at stake in saying so. The reason the card sort has survived twenty-five years in clinical practice is that it removes the free lunch. You can't keep all 93. You can't keep 30. By the time you're choosing between Loyalty and Autonomy with only one slot left, you're finding out something you didn't already know.
Winnow is that instrument, built for a screen. The underlying card sort was developed by researchers at the University of New Mexico and released into the public domain. It's used in motivational interviewing, addiction treatment, career counselling, and couples work. It's rigorous. It just happened to be trapped in a PDF you had to print, cut up, and lose half of.
The deck includes the values you'd rather not admit to.
Most values tools quietly removed the uncomfortable cards. You won't find Power, Wealth, Fame, Popularity, Attractiveness or Pleasure in them, because a deck of admirable options produces a flattering result and nobody complains about a flattering result.
The problem is that nobody is embarrassed to rank Kindness highly. If every card is something you'd be happy to say out loud, the exercise can't tell you anything you weren't already willing to say. The signal is in the trade-off you'd rather not make in public. Winnow keeps those cards.
The difficulty is deliberate. If it feels easy, you're not being honest yet.
One at a time into three piles — very important, important, not important. Keyboard shortcuts, so it moves fast. First instinct is usually the real one.
Your "very important" pile is probably thirty cards deep. Now you have ten slots. This is the step that does the work.
You get your ranked five, a map of the themes underneath them, where two of your values pull against each other, and five questions built from your specific answers.
Same instrument, three jobs.
You already use a values exercise in session two. If you're printing and cutting cards, or reading a list aloud, you're spending twenty minutes of billable time on logistics.
Send clients a link before the session. They arrive with a ranked five and a themed profile; you spend the hour on the conversation instead of the setup. Results land in your dashboard, branded as yours.
Team values workshops usually produce a poster nobody reads because the values were chosen by consensus, which is to say chosen by whoever spoke last.
Have everyone sort individually first. You get an aggregate map showing genuine overlap, genuine divergence, and the values one person cares about intensely that nobody else ranked — which is normally the most useful slide in the deck.
The sort itself is free and always will be. You pay for what happens after it.
Then $19 once, if you want the full report.
Unlimited clients. Cancel anytime.
Up to 25 people. Volume pricing above that.
Neither, exactly. It's a structured elicitation instrument — it doesn't score you against a population or sort you into a type. It surfaces what you prioritise when forced to trade off. The underlying card sort has been used in clinical and counselling settings since 2001. It is not a diagnostic tool and it isn't a substitute for therapy.
The Personal Values Card Sort by W.R. Miller, J. C'de Baca, D.B. Matthews and P.L. Wilbourne, University of New Mexico, 2001. The authors released it into the public domain and explicitly permit copying, adaptation, and use without permission. Winnow is an adaptation: all 83 original values are here, the definitions are shortened for reading on a screen, and ten values are added that the 2001 deck predates. The original wording is preserved in the data and available on request.
Balance, Belonging, Connection, Courage, Curiosity, Gratitude, Integrity, Kindness, Patience and Respect. None of them appear in the 2001 deck, and all ten are now standard vocabulary in coaching and organisational values work. A 25-year-old instrument is going to have gaps. Added cards are flagged in the data file, so anyone who needs the unmodified instrument can exclude them.
Because leaving them out is what makes most values exercises useless. If every card on the table is admirable, the result is a list of things you were already comfortable claiming. The information is in whether you'd rank Wealth above Compassion when only one slot is left. Ranking something here is not an endorsement of it, and nothing you sort is visible to anyone else.
On the free version, nothing leaves your browser. Results are held in local storage on your device and the share link encodes your results in the URL itself rather than storing them on a server. Practitioner and Team plans store results, because that's the point of them — with consent and deletion on request.
Because the sort is the demonstration. Nobody buys a values report from a company whose values exercise they haven't tried. It also happens to be the part that's public domain — charging for it would be poor form.
The free version stores nothing, so there's nothing to breach. The Practitioner plan is being built with a BAA and encrypted storage; it isn't live yet, which is why there's a waitlist rather than a checkout button. Don't put client data anywhere that won't sign a BAA, including here, until it's ready.
Eight minutes. Free. Then decide whether the rest is worth paying for.
Start the sortWe named it after the second one.