Visioning - Create a Powerful Vision That Leads You Or Your Team Far Ahead
Your vision of the future - whether it's positive or negative - is a much more powerful factor than you might ever guess in helping the shape your future success.
A vision that works motivates the person or group who hold it to take action to make the vision come true, no matter what obstacles they find ahead.
Effective visions are ones that appeal powerfully to both emotions and logic.
Discover, express and focus on a vision of the future that's clear, positive, compelling. Think of creating your vision as a way to "pr-experience" success, in detail. Think of the vision, itself, as a snapshot or preview of the future you are creating.
Here are tips about how you can create your
team or individual vision:
1. Create the time and space for it.
You need time to relax and let ideas flow. That requires time and space away from the pressures of the regular workday. Schedule the time in advance.
Create an environment for the visioning work that's free of interruptions and enables you or you and your team to think expansively, clearly, honestly, creatively.
If you're working with a group, engage a good facilitator if there's no one in your group, presently, who has those skills.
2. Envision a compelling future.
Start by setting a target date by which you hope your vision will be real. Perhaps that's 5, 10 or more years away. Whatever it is, make it a specific date.
Next, imagine what you will have achieved by this time. Imagine in detail. "Be there now."
If it is a business vision you are creating imagine what your customers, collaborators, and competitors are saying at this future time about you or your group, your results and how you created them:
When you see and hear their reactions, what do you like?
- What do you want to change, about what they are saying about you, in that future state?
Now, as you imagine being in this future, imagine how you feel about what you have achieved by this time:
- What do you like best?
- What do you want to add or change?
3. Capture and sort the input to create the vision.
Capture the ideas you're generating in writing or graphics, whether you're creating your own vision, or working with a group.
Sort the information in some easy way as you move through the process. You can use mind maps, clustering techniques, or structured brainstorming exercises.
You can also create a graphic template ahead of time of a metaphor you want to use to catch and organize the ideas that lead to your ultimate vision. For example, some people use a metaphor of taking a journey, mountain climbing, surfing, or building a city. There are many other metaphors you can also use.
4. Refine and post the vision. Then follow up.
Take the visioning work you've done, and distill it, whether you're working on your own, or in a group.
Produce a simple final vision statement or graphic.
Post the vision in a prominent place where you or your team will see it regularly. That may be a physical space, or if you're working as part of a virtual or dispersed team, post it on an online space you share.
Visioning - Great Leaders See, Engage Their Teams to Create a Better Future Ahead
Visionary leadership is one of the top characteristics of great leaders.
Leaders who have this ability can see a better future for their teams and organizations.
They're very successful at engaging others in a common vision, and leading them in the process of creating that future together.
A positive vision is far more powerful than many people would guess. And for a team, that is especially true.
In the absence of such a vision, individual members of a team - any team - are likely to be pulled, quite naturally, in the direction of their own visions of the future.
And often, at best, these individual visions are not well-aligned.
At worst, they directly conflict.
For example, some people are driven by great fear of the things they're trying to avoid. They're filled to the brim by graphic visions of the very things they dread.
They may not realize how powerful these fear-filled visions are, perhaps even leading them closer to the very things they wish to avoid. They need a compelling, positive vision to replace their fear.
Other employees, in their great desire to try to manage change, are motivated by visions of protecting the status quo, sometimes at all costs.
These visions can be helpful in the short-term when change is chaotic and they reduce the undesirable effects that some change change can bring.
But in the long-term, status-quo focused visions are likely to freeze the organization in place - while customers and competitors continue to move far ahead.
What happens if individual employees are working to visions that conflict?
The result is likely to be wasted effort, time and opportunities, as well as distraction, team dissension - anything but a focus on customers, and the team effort required to make sure their needs are well-met.
Ultimately, of course, dissatisfied customers take their business to competitors, or decide to quit buying the types of products and services you sell, altogether.
Great leaders gather and direct the full range of their team's resources - their time, talent, attention, energy, and, of course, budget - to create a strong and positive shared vision of the future for their companies, customers and team.
And then they make it happen, continuing to adapt effectively as they lead their organizations ahead.
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