How to truly help leaders with visioning work?

May 6

Pre-covid, Greg Bernarda and I would often meet in different parts of the globe where work or pleasure took us to compete (kind of) ferociously on the tennis court and talk about our work practice. With the pandemic we had not met in more than 18 months, but managed to meet up recently for a few days and maintain this friendly tradition.

One day, as we sat down for breakfast after our morning tennis session, Greg said “In the absence of a true vision, innovation and transformation endeavours struggle to deliver sustainable outcomes. ” That statement led to an intense conversation on visioning and whether one can truly help leaders define a new vision for their company.

The ability to go beyond an existing business model, to transcend current industry boundaries, or to connect to a higher purpose that we’ve seen in some organisations all started with a new vision. But this doesn’t happen that often.

In this blogpost I want to summarise our key convictions on how to truly help business leaders free themselves from the daily grind and come up with positive visions for their companies.

What a vision looks like

Definition: In a business context, a vision can be defined as a clear point of view on the future of the world and the role an organization can play in it.

A genuine vision often starts as an individual experience, nourished by someone’s life journey, triggered by new insights on the world and where it’s going, insights that generate a powerful emotion and renewed energy.

Greg and I are huge fans of Patagonia as a pioneer organisation and could remember the long journey that led Yvon Chouinard to the insights that eventually crystallized in Patagonia’s new vision and mission statement: We're In Business To Save Our Home Planet.

When Patagonia declares “we appreciate that all life on earth is under threat of extinction. We aim to use the resources we have—our business, our investments, our voice and our imaginations—to do something about it.” They express a clear point of view on the future of the world and the role they intend to play in it.

In this case this clarity and integration of vision, mission and values did not happen in a 2-day workshop. It was truly the result of a life journey by Yvon Chouinard and his team. We highly recommend reading “let my people go surfing” if you want to know more.

The main blockers of visioning work

The main blocker is often time. Many leadership teams don’t make time for visioning work at all. Some don’t really see the difference between a vision and a strategy, and since they already have a strategy why would they need to spend time on a vision?

In their book Lead from the future, Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz explain the difference and relationship between the two beautifully.

“Vision is the “what,’” not the “how.” Vision is made actionable through strategy, which is the means to achieve it.” Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz

And when leadership teams decide to work on a vision, they often struggle to come up with anything truly original. Many factors contribute to this, but we think the main ones are:

Lack of time again. There are just too many demands on leaders’ time already from staff and projects, priorities given to delivering the next quarter objectives, managing an on-going crisis, preparing the next board meeting, etc.
Disconnection from the outside world. Given the demands of their role, it is often hard for leaders to stay connected and curious about the outside world, which can create a tunnel vision and dangerous blindspots.
Lack of diversity. When leaders come from the same background, have studied in the same schools, read the same content, then they can mutually reinforce obsolete convictions in each other, and it can get difficult for them to see the weak signals of emergent shifts.
Support from wrong partners. Traditional consulting companies helping with visioning work can steer leaders towards uniform answers that are more in line with their own agenda. Whether it is an ERP upgrade, a merger, a demerger, a cost-cutting program, a re-organisation, etc.
Unshakeable status quo. Existing and interiorized constraints in an organisation (e.g. quarterly reporting) often limit the collective ability to imagine a positive new vision.
Surface commitment. Leaders’ sense of identity in large organisations is often linked to the protection of the status quo, in what is perceived as the best interest of the organisation. In that case, surface support for visioning work would quickly hit deeply-rooted resistance to the change that any new vision could trigger.
A complacent process. Going through the motions of visioning work in a standardised workshop with a templated approach won’t take you very far. In our career we came across many “vision+mission” workshops, enough of them to know they often lead to outcomes that feel forced and artificial.

So does this mean we cannot help leaders define a new vision for their company and should leave its emergence to chance?

Greg and I are convinced that there’s no point in bringing leaders together in the workshop room before they are ready. A failed attempt at defining a new vision could have a counterproductive effect, triggering new waves of cynicism and then reinforcing the status quo.

Luckily there is another path.

Another path for visioning work

We can still successfully help visioning work with designed interventions at two key moments: “before” by sharing inputs that nourish leaders’ visioning work, and “after” by helping leaders crystallize their insights into a collective vision.

Start with individual visioning

By individual visioning we mean the process by which you call in new information on the world into your awareness. And the best way to help leaders with individual visioning is to expose them to lots of new inputs. Spoon-feeding won’t work. They need to start their own individual quest. A quest for new insights with an openness to learn and be changed. So before any collective work, we suggest tailoring slow, individual journeys that connect leaders with:

Thinking time. Creating time away from imminent deadlines and daily routines for leaders to truly think about their point of view on the world and where it’s going,
The outside world. Sharing stories and examples of companies that went through inspiring shifts and transformations, created new value for the world. But also simply getting out of the building and into the world,
New data. Providing leaders with private data from their company showing weak signals of new customer behaviors and starting market shifts,
Emotions. Helping leaders connect with their emotions related to disruption, growth, the environment, and let them better inform their future course of action,
Values. Letting leaders reflect on potential gaps between their company’s business model(s) and their values, and possible alternative ways to create value in better alignment with their values. Reconnecting with their sense of place in the world, and individual purpose,
A longer timeframe. Challenging the usual timeframe of value creation from the next quarter or year to 6+ years into the future or a leader’s overall career to shift their thinking.

Such experiences run over months. And new insights gathered can become powerful triggers for a new vision.

From individual visioning to shared vision

When a new point of view on the world starts to emerge, but is not yet explicit, then it is time to bring leaders to the workshop room. A facilitated discussion will create opportunities for feedback loops, and additional connections and insights.

The visioning work should still be iterative. And it should tap into the collective intelligence of the group. Psychological safety is key here. Negative or cynical reactions at that wrong moment could break the trust within a team and block the whole process.

A skilled internal or external facilitator is essential at this critical moment when individual insights crystallize into a collective vision. She walks the team through a safe experience that clarifies aspirations, brings out depth, colours, and nuances of insights, and makes self-imposed blockers and their underlying assumptions explicit. Ultimately this work crystallises into a new vision by the leadership team.

In my career, I have been fortunate to witness this several times with leaders who displayed great courage, and built positive visions to transform aged-care, make energy-production carbon-neutral, provide access to justice to even more citizens, or access to life-saving treatments in emerging markets.

Envisioning a (business) world we want to live in

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Barack Obama

In our current context with the pandemic, the increasing threats of environmental and democratic collapses, the digital acceleration that could make companies and entire industries obsolete, etc. true visioning work is more critical than ever. Leaders have a duty to build resilience in their organisation, and many leaders we work with also aspire to balance creating value with living in better harmony with their values.

So we hope that individual visioning and insights sharing workshops soon become a more widespread leadership practice, one that gives leaders more courage to tackle big strategic shifts or even challenges beyond the typical remit of their company.

Think of the small Patagonia on a mission to save our home planet.

“A shared vision is not an idea… it is, rather, a force in people’s hearts. … Few, if any forces in human affairs are as powerful.” Peter Senge, the fifth discipline

Without tapping into that powerful force, change is close to impossible in a large company. But when you’re connected to the power of a genuine vision, then nothing’s impossible.

So, if you are leading an organisation in the midst of our 21st century challenges, it’s time to start visioning. And reach out to share what insights you got. We’re keen to help you build a (business) world we’d all want to live in!