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.
Step 1: Individual and group interviews
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.
Step 2: Analysis and feedback
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.
Step 3: Visioning Workshop design
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.
Step 4: Facilitating the Visioning Workshop
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.
Step 5: Future Visioning Workshops
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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But when we see a world around us which is struggling. And we see evil go unchecked and unpunished. The things we value are being lost. And it all seems to be heading in the wrong direction. What then happens to our hope?
And for those of us that lead or influence organisations, we have to ask ourselves, what are we doing to increase hope? Where are our people placing their hope? And what is the role of our organisation in inspiring and channeling that hope? How do we and our organisation become creators of hope?
What is needed is what we call adventurous vision. A creative expansion of the perspective of the organisation and the people within it. A shared picture of a future that matters, and which creates meaning for all involved in it. Something that makes a real difference for the people within the organisation, and the people they interact with outside of it. A pursuit that offers them a sense of pride in the difference they will make – what they truly, confidently, HOPE to achieve.
The two most important things in creating adventurous visions are conversation, and asking the questions ‘Why?’ and ‘What if …?’.
History? Really?
This case study illustrates the use of visioning techniques to draw out and deploy a compelling vision through the organisation
Coming up with the right vision is primarily about asking the right questions. We all have ideas that excite us, dreams that make us feel more alive. But most of us sadly do not spend a lot of time in that space, particularly in the office. And after a while it is easy to forget that we do. So sometimes it can take a bit of time to find the questions that can help people re-cross that threshold. To access corners of their thinking that link to hope and aspiration. And to inspire a belief that they can make this a everyday reality in their work.
In our work, we typically use four main ways of accessing that space:
It was a bit of a chilly, damp morning, and none of them really had the footwear for what they were about to do. However, tramping over the adjacent country park was going to prove far more conducive to what had to be done than sitting in a warm office.
There is something about walking that really helps these sort of conversations. The metronome pulse of the steps; the acceptance of silence as you think; the constantly changing scenery; the sense of forward motion. Even the idea that once you have the ‘answer’ you still have to walk back, and in that time you can discover a better answer.
Then the consultant asked: “So can we think silently for a while about what difference you might be making that would be making you feel that way?” When they compared notes a few minutes later, the sparks flew, excitement rose, and something transformational took place between them.
Accordingly, a two day workshop was convened for the leadership team and the consultant set about designing a process for it. One which would help people arrive at their own interpretations of the vision (by walking together). Which then enabled them to reconcile their interpretations together into something they felt inspired to achieve. And then to build on that in terms of the difference their own teams would make in delivering it.
Walkround visioning where people engage with insightful visioning questions on flipcharts, and add their answers below. This can be a new train of thought, or building on someone else’s idea from the flipchart. This work is often preceded by relaxation and guided visualisation exercises to stimulate the thinking beforehand. It is brought together through further workshop sessions to highlight those that are most important to people, and to harmonise them into a complete vision. This has been used with a major retailer to break through into more ambitious and inspiring ways of thinking about their role.
The use of modelling or drawing to think and communicate in different, and usually more memorable, ways about what is to be achieved. This can be done in a relatively straightforward way – taking the ideas as presented. But it can also be further enhanced by exploring metaphors within the models to access creative insights from the subconscious. This is an important and powerful aspect of Lego Serious Play, one of the modelling techniques). The drawing approach has been used in many clients as an initial icebreaker exercise to open things up. The modelling approach has been used with a project management team in a medical devices company to great effect.
