Visioneering – The First Step on the Path

Imagine a room with a round table. A table, rather large, with many seats around it. In those seats sit people with the power to generate ideas, and the ability to work towards a common objective. This group can solve the greatest challenges to mankind if given the right mix of direction and free hand. Innovation within organizations often starts this way. Different viewpoints come together to provide nuance and perspective, resulting in a new direction that evolves over time and consensus. This process, sometimes called Ideation, is the first step following the realization that change must occur.

In an organizational context, it can be very challenging to get all team members working in the same direction. Human nature comes with individual agendas, personality differences and, yes, even egos can get in the way of progress towards change. One way around these common pitfalls, or at least make them manageable, is to clarify and itemize the joint need for change prior to diving into the process. This can be done through collaborative visioneering.

Vision is an intimidating word. When people talk of vision, they immediately go to pictures of Einstein, Hughes or Gates. In reality, vision represents a new state of the world, based on the facts in front of you. It can be deconstructed, and at its best involves a team of experts/leaders sharing thoughts rather than the single man waving a wand chanting ‘Abracadabra’. Vision is a process that steps from today into tomorrow, anchored by the bridge of assessments. Assessments are simply an opinion expressed by an individual. The more informed the individual, the better the assessment.

One of the prime benefits of visioneering is its collaborative nature. Getting a team of people to develop an idea that they own collectively is powerful for an organization. Not only does it harness the talents available, but with buy-in, it creates champions within the organization that can drive the change in their worlds. It is incredibly difficult to cause organic change within a large organization. Management cannot ‘memo’ change. It has to be taken to the ‘troops’ locally. The reality of most organizations, especially larger ones, is that they are a collection of sub-entities that spend the bulk of their time and resources driving their functional specialty for the better of the whole. By bringing together the Intrapreneurs in the different silos of the firm, the firm gives change its best chance of success.

Intrapreneurs are key to this equation. They are the innovators within a firm who take the risks to drive to the next level. They never ask ‘what’s next?’, instead they define it before anyone even knows it happens. They are comfortable with change, and will not be constrained by what they see in front of their eyes. By staffing the team with Intrapreneurs, the change leader gets an army who not only add to strategy, but go on to implement that strategy in the field.

Intrapreneurs also come armed with knowledge and data. Knowledge and data are critical to visioneering. In order to extract a vision that is relevant to your Customer, that vision must reflect the Customer. These team members are constantly striving to deliver to the Customer their desires, and are intimately aware of those desires. If they do not bring a quantifiable and objective arsenal of data from the Customer to the table, research needs to precede any attempt at visioneering. The old axiom stands center stage, Garbage In – Garbage Out.

Once the data is in, think big. The major mistake most planners make is that they give themselves an easy hurdle to clear. That may be nice at year-end, when your checklist boss benchmarks on targets, but you will never be great. The key to proper visioneering is to ‘break the known’. Put you and your team in an area where there is discomfort. Rather than starting with an ‘achievable goal’, start with the ‘right goal’. Visioneering is not about easy goals, nor is it about impossible goals. It is about desirable goals. A good test of your crew is the answer “I don’t know” to the question, “Is this doable?”. Once the team is outside its comfort zone, boundaries get stretched and real innovation starts to bubble.

This team then constructs a hypothesis for the future. The team must postulate, ‘Based on what our Customer tells us, this is what we need to deliver by this future point in time’. This hypothesis needs to be measurable, both in terms of content deliverables and time. Aggressive is the key when setting benchmarks. The idea of visioneering and planning is not to set up success, it is meant to chart a course. If this group finds at a later date that these goals need to be adjusted, a ‘breakdown’ is declared, and the team adjusts. If a quarterback lines up for a run play, and sees a defense ready for that run, an audible is called, rather than losing yards and risking injury. A plan is a tool, not a bible, and must evolve based on a dynamic environment.

At the end of the day, a vision is meant to change the game, not tweak the rules. If an organization is happy with results, and sees no reason for change, don’t. Most firms are not running on all cylinders, and need to look towards the next areas of growth. A prerequisite to wrangling that growth is defining what that opportunity looks like and how the firm captures it. Visioneering is a concrete process to do just that.