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Visioning
As you think about mobilizing your organization to deal with those high priority challenges and opportunities, visioning plays a key role. At its core, vision is a compelling portrait of where we are going to go together and why we should feel excited about getting there. That’s different than the mission of the organization, which is what we do. It’s different from the strategy of the organization, which is how we do it. It’s different from the purpose of the organization, which is why beyond creating stakeholder value and making profit, the organization exists. Vision, I believe, is both the most challenging, but ultimately the most energizing for your organization.
As you engage in visioning both individually but also collectively, keep in mind that there’s a core tension you need to be thinking about and managing carefully, and that tension is between ambition and achievability. Great visions strike the balance. Err too far on the side of ambition, you’re creating something that’s unrealistic. Too far on the side of achievability, it’s too easy. It’s not exciting for people. It doesn’t really fundamentally motivate them.
Creating Buy-In
At its core, visioning is about identifying the future to which you are trying to move your organization as tangibly and in as much detail as possible. But this is a reason why I believe it’s so important to engage with your team and your organization early on, creating a shared vision that everyone has bought into. I have seen circumstances where leaders have created a very compelling vision, but not fully enlisted their teams and organizations into the realization of that vision. And then when things don’t quite work out the way, you know, they were supposed to, there can be some finger-pointing. Your vision wasn’t a very good vision. You really immunize yourself against that and you really empower the organization in a much greater degree if you involve people early in the creation of the shared vision.
When people think about strategic thinking, visioning often comes to mind, and it’s sometimes thought to be the province of just a few highly creative people. That’s far from the truth. Everyone is able to build their capacity to engage in visioning. The world is far too complex to be relying on a single strategic thinker to be leading the organization into the future. And if you buy into the idea of shared visioning, you can enlist the creative capabilities of your team as a whole. Visioning, as with other key elements of strategic thinking, must be a team sport today. Absolutely build up your ability to engage in visioning, but enlist your team, create that shared vision, and mobilize the energy to accomplish it.
Three Key Components
As you strive to develop your ability to engage in visioning, it helps to understand that there are some key components that you can work on that will help you do that. The first is intentional observation, being fully present with what’s going on, discerning the real essence of things in order to then lay the foundation for imaginative visualization, which is thinking about the many possibilities that exist and that could be motivating and pull people forward. And then, of course, there’s the piece that’s about clarification. Intentional observation tells you what to look at. Creative visualization creates the universe of possibility. Clarification lets you distill it down to its essence and begin to really codify it and leverage it to energize your organization.