Demonstrating the importance of vision
How using a festival analogy can defeat resistance (with free Canva template).
(NB: This article is written in British English. Quotations contain their original spellings in American English.)
A mission is not enough — your organisation also needs a clearly defined and internally publicised vision of how it aims to evolve. But how can you convince key organisational influencers? Many organisations have their mission and values well defined, but a vision statement — a bold proclamation of where your company (or even team) is heading — is sometimes an uncomfortable step too far.
Creating a vision is by definition an admittance that you’re not as good as you want to be and is often perceived by leaders of businesses as showing weakness.
Setting out a clear vision however, is critical for any organisation that wishes to stay at the top of its game. No matter how good you are today, if you aren’t constantly improving you will fall behind your competitors eventually.
A vision statement that is well publicised throughout the business serves to put everyone on the same path, pulling together from the various areas of the business towards a single destination. The absence of a vision might cause misunderstanding among key employees about what’s best for the business, whose work might then lead them to suffer the fallout from competing priorities.
No one is able to deliver exactly what is needed.
There are many studies that empirically demonstrate how organisational vision is directly linked to performance but trying to convince people with facts often backfires as entrenched perspectives will always burn more fiercely in people’s consciousness.
Using an analogy is a powerful method of encouraging a change in perspective. When you can guide people to an inevitable conclusion and then demonstrate how this conclusion relates directly to your business proposal they have already bought in to what you are saying. The key is to find the proper analogy. And for the purpose of demonstrating how critical vision is to an organisation, a company festival is a perfect one.
Begin by organising a workshop with key stakeholders from the business to talk about driving an already defined strategy. An hour would be ideal to allow for discussion after the initial presentation.
To prepare for the workshop, create a festival poster (adapt this one on Canva for free). Using your corporate palette and other organisational hooks will really help the analogy to resonate.
You could use a reference to the strategy you want to drive as the festival name (or the name of the team you are engaging with if it’s a single team) and organisational jargon instead of band names.
When the meeting time/date arrives, welcome everyone and follow the usual convention for beginning your meetings (with roundtable introductions for example). Then, ask them to come with you on an imaginary journey!
Introduce your festival (ensure they don’t think that you’re proposing an ACTUAL festival or they will certainly be very confused) and tack the poster to the wall there and then. Make it as real as you can however, adding in details that have organisational meaning. Get everyone excited for even just a moment and tell them that this is going to be the BEST festival ever in the history of festivals. It’s all organised, everything is finalised; the venue is booked and so are the bands.
There’s no script for this part, it’s up to you to craft this to your own strengths, the personalities in the room and the environment at your company.
Now, ask everyone to brainstorm for five minutes:
“What will our employees need in order to get to our festival and have an amazing time?”
Have your meeting attendees call out what people will need and write these down on a flipchart or whiteboard. You will likely get all kinds of responses, typical ones being:
- money
- transport
- clothing
- food/drink
- accommodation
What you are looking for at this point is a good selection of things, and hopefully someone will have pointed out that employees will need to know where the festival is (destination). If they haven’t suggested this yet, you might need to do a bit of prompting to get it on the list.
Now, thank everyone for their input and encourage discussion around each thing in turn (or group items if the brainstorming session has been particularly frenzied). You should find that pretty much everything on the list has alternatives and is therefore not an essential but a nice-to-have.
Depending on your attendees you may have to take the lead here, but do encourage everyone to be creative if you can:
- Money can be borrowed from friends. Perhaps everything is free or there are cash machines available.
- Transport could be by coach organised by the company, shared lifts or even hitchhiking.
- Clothing is not really essential if you think about it! If you don’t have any you could buy some from stalls onsite or even fashion a blanket into a poncho.
- Food/drink could be available on site, friends might be able to share, at a pinch you could pick berries and hunt rabbits.
- Accommodation could be at a nearby hotel or hostel, making a shelter from a plastic sheet, sleeping in a vehicle, etc. You get the general idea!
The ONLY element that employees will need in order to enjoy the festival that has ABSOLUTELY NO POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE are details of the destination. Without the destination, no one knows where to go. The chances of everyone arriving in the same place, and that place being where the festival actually is, are infinitesimal.
At this point, if everything has gone to plan, you will experience a tangible “Aha!” moment in the room. There will be nods of agreement and your meeting attendees will have bought in to this simple fact. From there you can employ a classic bait-and-switch move. It’s now obvious that if the company doesn’t have a vision of where they are going then it’s practically impossible that they will ever get there!
You can now present on the topic of vision, using more tangible facts to support the case you’re making (which everyone in the room has already signed up to).
If your organisation has defined values and a purpose or mission, reiterate what these are in your presentation. Wrap around these some suitable quotes about company visions, such as:
“[V]ision significantly affects organization-level performance…” Baum et al., (1998).
“[Vision] can create the spark that lifts organizations beyond the mundane […] and can build both staff and customer satisfaction […].” And
“[C]areful empirical studies have revealed important […] relationships between vision and organizational outcomes […].” O’Connell, David & Karl Hickerson, DBA & Pillutla, Arun. (2011).
“Creation of shared vision will positively impact team cohesion, and will partially mediate the relationship of […] leadership with team performance.” Dionne, Yammarino, Atwater, and Spangler (2004).
There are many more authoritative quotes to be found. Pick ones that resonate with your company’s particular situation or objectives.
Explain some of the tangible benefits of creating a company vision, e.g.:
- Unify and enhance effectiveness
- Provide direction on action and decision making
- Inspire and motivate.
And finally propose a draft vision or a way forward.
There’s plenty of help and information online around creating a company vision. It’s now up to you and those in the room to decide on what your next steps need to be to make a strong and inspirational vision statement a reality at your company.
