Visioning Workshops – 5 steps to a common purpose

Visioning workshops are the most powerful and sustainable means to pull your people together into a common purpose in support of your future success. They provide the means harness and align the passion and creative energy of all of your people, and build individual commitment toward a shared goal.

Key to their success is understanding where people are ‘coming from’ as they come into the visioning workshop. This is key to designing an efficient visioning workshop journey. One that facilitates people to coming together from their different starting positions, recognising the validity in each others’ perspectives, and seeing the potential for a powerful common purpose which transcends the differences and offers more than people’s initial expectations.

Our interviewing approach allows people to feel understood and respected in their current views. But it builds from there in tapping into their imagination to identify what sort of future would inspire them and their commitment.

It asks them to imagine a point in the future where they feel justifiably proud of what has been achieved. And it asks them to describe the key factors in generating that sense of pride. It draws them into the possibility of adventure. A description of the future that is ambitious and exciting. Something that makes the investment of the next period of their lives truly worthwhile.

And it asks them to think about how those around them might feel about the same adventure. Along with what might be the challenges, and how they overcome. And it seeks to understand what they might want personally from the experience of the next few years in terms of growth, and experience, and achievement for others.

Finally it asks them, as the customers for the workshop, what they want it to achieve. What would make them leave the workshop feeling that the exercise had been really worthwhile.

In this way, the interview process begins to open up people’s thinking at a very personal level, and to get them to think about possibilities and potential beyond their everyday mindset. And it makes them curious, for how their answers compare with those of their colleagues. And also about what might emerge from the visioning workshop itself.

Thus when the interviews are analysed and the summary report is shared back to them the begin to see the collective view and how it varies. And this begins to work on them leading up to the workshop, building a sense of hope and expectation for something really significant to emerge, and wanting to be part of that.

Furthermore, they can see their own answers within the flow of a collective picture. And they can see their contribution to what they hope the workshop will achieve. Together, these begin to build their ownership for the feedback document, and the workshop that will address it. It also helps them to see the variety of perspectives, and where their own ideas may be out of kilter with those of their friends and colleagues. And it builds a greater acceptance that their may need to be some compromise to bring it all together.

Moving from individual positions to embrace and support a collective vision of a common purpose, is a journey. It is a journey in which commitment needs to be built and preserved and reconciled as the collective will emerges and flourishes. And key to achieving that it that the process is both transparent and scrupulously fair.

In reality, people may only get about 80% of what they thought they wanted originally. Of course they may get another chunk of stuff that they only discovered they wanted as the journey unfolded. And inevitably there will be another chunk of stuff that they are not so sure about. But one thing is almost certain if the process is right: Even if they only individually would select 70% of what emerges, they know it will take them a lot further toward their goals than 100% of what they originally imagined. And they are wholly willing to support the other 30% because of that. That is consensus.

Designing a workshop to provoke, feed and support that journey of consensus is both an art and a science. A science because of the wealth of tools that exist to explore and resolve common purpose. And an art because of the role that experience plays in pulling those tools together. On thing is sure for the designer of the workshop, when its right, you know its right.

Ideally, if we design the workshop  perfectly, the process of the workshop will flow naturally and intuitively. It will seem to provide the natural next step at precisely the right moment. And people will not even realise they are following a process. Most of the time, a well designed workshop will feel that way.  But there will still be little bumps in the road. And some interventions just need to be tuned and timed to what is happening in the moment. That is where facilitation comes in.

Facilitation is about being a servant to the process, as the process is the servant to the combined will of the people.

In respect of visioning workshops, one key aspect is about provoking a vision that really is worth of the people’s potential. That really will feel like an adventure which engages their spirit, their enthusiasm and their ideas. The thing about creativity is that you don’t know that you can do something until the creativity has been required, and has delivered. Creativity needs headroom in order to flourish. It needs us to preserve a space between what we already know to be possible, and what we have not yet foreseen. And it needs confidence in our own ability to respond, to grow, to learn, and to imagine. That is the adventure. And it is important that the facilitator keeps the space for adventure alive.

Fortunately, if the interviews are conducted well, there will be plenty of raw material from the people themselves to provide that creative tension.

For more on the design of visioning workshops, take a look at this explanation, and this case study.

Pursuing an adventurous shared vision is a learning experience. 12 months in, the people who started off on the adventure, are not the same people you now meet. They have grown in ability, confidence and understanding. The perspectives they had 12 months earlier have evolved. New insights, and collaborative experiences have stretched the way that they think and the potential they see around them. And they are coming to discover that what they thought was 70% right was actually only 50% right, but that is okay because they have only had time to cover 30% of the ground.

However, there is a lot of new stuff to take into account. New information, new possibilities, new resources, new relationships, new ideas.

For this reason, it is good to revisit the Visioning Workshop each year. Sometimes just to make adjustments. And sometimes to refresh the whole approach. The former can be achieved by simply reworking some of the sessions in the original workshop. But the latter will probably benefit from a new wave of interviews and a repeat of steps two, three and four.

Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics

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