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Background: In organisational and institutional contexts, values are often articulated verbally yet remain abstract in everyday practice. Gaps between stated values and how they are enacted can generate tension, insecurity, and relational strain, often experienced somatically as stress, exhaustion, or disorientation. Healing, in this sense, concerns how values are collectively sensed, interpreted, and enacted in concrete situations rather than only articulated.

Objectives: This contribution introduces SMALL ACTING THINGS as an embodied healing arts practice for negotiating values in organisational and health-adjacent contexts. It explores how silent, material-based negotiations can support an embodied understanding of what values mean in everyday life and how they are interpreted and enacted in practice.

Methods: The practice builds on the long-term artistic research project ACTING THINGS and its method of silent negotiations. Participants negotiate relations and values through non-verbal, material, and embodied interaction using sand as a fluid medium. Simple rules suspend verbal debate and habitual hierarchies, creating an equal ground. Through bodily movement and material traces, values such as collectivity, individuality, safety, and change are explored as lived relations.

Results: The silent negotiations shift attention from opposing positions toward care for the situation as a whole. Participants engage in distributed responsibility and perspective-taking in situations of tension or uncertainty. Differences in perspectives and understandings become tangible and form a shared ground for sense-making, supporting an embodied “grasping” of values in organisational life.

Conclusion: SMALL ACTING THINGS frames the healing arts as a practice of embodied understanding and relational care, reconnecting social values with lived experience through material, non-verbal inquiry.