How to set the scene for a challenging vision

Making a meaningful difference in the lives of those you serve is a perfect future vision for sustainable success and differentiating as a service provider in your market. Making a meaningful difference gives a higher purpose to the organization and gives meaning to the work you do. Although the vision is a great aspiration, often it means a change of mental legacy. The logic of the organization changes and requires breaking with current practices and habits.

So, how do you organize a process that will help you and your colleagues to define a challenging and aspirational vision that feels sufficiently uncomfortable enough and inspires you to act towards a renewed, meaningful future?

Design to explore

Over the last 20 years, I have helped clients define their challenging future vision that sets profound changes in motion. It has become a fundamental element of our Make Change Happen method and has set up many teams with renewed energy and ideas to create a meaningful future.

I usually design a workshop for 1 or 2 days to facilitate teams exploring new ambitions. I always incorporate three essential elements to make these workshops effective and valuable. I will shortly explain them.

1. Define how the output looks

Every workshop needs clear and meaningful output. The most negligible result for a challenging vision workshop should be a well-defined vision statement and a maximum of 5 bold strategic steps required to fulfill the vision. A good template and methodology help you to deliver that output. For this purpose, I love to work with the 5 Steps bold vision canvas and the OGSM model.

The bold vision canvas is brilliant for creating a draft vision, including your high-level bold strategies to get to your vision. I use it as a quick deliverable that gives clarity about the choices made by the team. Often, just delivering a bold vision canvas sets enough direction for a team to continu the process without further assistance.

If a team needs a more comprehensive outcome of their vision and strategy process, OGSM is an effective methodology to work with.

The OGSM model forces you the formulate your vision and strategies in a very concise manner. And it forces you to make bold choices. The most excellent insight from working with OGSM is the "objective by" rule. Defining an objective is not enough; you must add the "by-part," which sets the direction of your choices. For example, many service providers want to deliver an excellent customer experience. That in itself doesn't provide much guidance for your organization. Adding that you want to accomplish this vision by leveraging the opportunities of new technologies does. Aligning your organization needs this level of specification.

A great benefit of the "objective-by" rule is to set goals on both parts and measure your progress on each. This measurement ensures accurate insights into the validity and success of your plans.

2. Embrace an explorative mindset

Going for a challenging vision means going beyond the known and familiar tracks. You try to reach something that you haven’t achieved before. As a result, you can’t download best practices from the past and must explore new ways to achieve the desired meaningful future. Strategy and planning get a new perspective.

Your vision and strategies are hypotheses. They are your best guess of your future and how to get there. The hypotheses needs to be tested and validated. Being in the process of defining your vision for the forthcoming years is not a matter of creating absolute certainty about the future. It is about setting a direction toward a meaningful future from the premise that you will learn from the future as it emerges.

A challenging vision workshop must stimulate an explorative mindset that helps you go beyond the beaten tracks. It creates an explorative journey that allows you to try, learn, and adjust your route toward the future. Also, it provides safeguards for not succeeding at once. What may feel like failing is OK as long as you know and apply your learnings in the next steps of the journey.

You have to set a direction, define some simple guiding principles, and go ahead without knowing all the details and peculiarities upfront. Trust the process and the collective wisdom to learn from the future as it emerges.

Capturing simple guiding principles is a crucial element of the workshop. Guiding principles help you make clear and transparent decisions during the trip. Compare them with guiding principles when planning a holiday: If traveling sustainably is one of your guiding principles, it sets clear boundaries for your choices. 

Simple guiding principles help keep the journey on track and prevent you from getting lost in the woods while exploring new grounds.

3. A comfortable discomfortable process

Defining a challenging vision equals uncertainty and discomfort. It may lead to disengagement among team members dealing with these feelings. And they have every right to do so. Being challenged about your professional future happens outside your comfort zone. It is where the magic happens, creativity comes to the front end, and hidden treasures grow. Still, even discomfort needs some comfort to be effective. An effective process needs a psychologically safe environment where everyone may feel vulnerable, dares to fail, and is open to new experiences.

Designing a good process is complicated since it must balance challenge (create discomfort) and safety (create comfort):

• The discomfort should be about assumptions, perspectives, and ingrained truths.

• Comfort should be about including each member in the process.

In my experience, LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) is one of the best methods to achieve this balance. LSP ensures that everybody has a voice that needs to be heard. And by transferring personal stories to 3D metaphors, the tale becomes exchangeable. After using the methodology for eight years now, I'm still amazed by the power of the bricks building.

Want to learn more?

You can start designing your Challenging Vision workshop with these three core elements. Want to know more about my experiences with challenging visions workshops? Subscribe to our newsletter or contact us directly.