How do visioning workshops enable us to visualise adventure and create exciting shared visions and common purpose?
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Common Purpose: Bringing people together to define the future they want to be
Visualising adventure, seeing visions, dreaming dreams! These things surely engage our spirit and enthusiasm in making things happen.Whoever we are, at whatever level we operate, they provide meaning and direction. And consequently they provide a sense of purpose that makes our work worthwhile, whatever our role.
vision and purpose makes work worthwhile
When those visions and dreams dovetail with the visions and dreams of those around us, they create a common purpose. As a result, they provide the basis for teamwork and relationships which get things done, and enriches us as people. The epitome of strategy engagement.A key part of our work in Culturistics is about helping teams and organisations develop a shared vision of themselves. Specifically, a vision that transcends the problems and conflicts of today. We want them to visualise an adventure; a journey that will call them into discovery, creativity, and new insights about themselves and their potential. A shared destination that ignites their spirit and their imagination, and which inspires a sense of pride.
This draws them together into a common purpose to make a difference. A difference that offers a new sense of meaning to all of them, individually and collectively. Such a shared vision puts current difficulties in context, and provides the creative basis for moving beyond them.
an adventure is a shared vision which calls us all into a new and better version of ourselves
While shared vision can apply to anything, it is organisation-wide shared visions that are most powerful, and challenging.Culturistics’ approach to helping clients create these begins with individual discussions based on adventurous questions.
As a result, people extend their horizon to the potential that exists. They tap into their own potential in engaging with this. Drawing them out into their own energy and creativity.
These discussions not only help shift people to a place of potential, they also make them curious about their colleagues’ answers. And about what it might all mean when each person’s vision is brought together in order to create the shared vision.
shifting people to a place of potential
We pull the outcomes of these discussions into a shared platform for the purpose of enabling people to dream together. That is a platform where they can lift their imaginations further in order to develop a shared vision, To visualise their adventure together. And to inspire themselves by the possibilities in each other’s ideas.This takes place during our Visioning Workshops. Depending on circumstances, these workshops can be both virtual and physical (and sometimes both). During the Visioning Workshop, much of the work takes place on the prepared platform (as illustrated above right for a physical workshop).
These workshops provide the basis for people pull their ideas together in to a shared vision. In effect, their joint adventure. The result is further enriched by the idea of embarking on the adventure together, and seeing themselves, as a team, anew.
adventuring together in a shared vision
Our Visioning Workshops have inspired people who lead or support teams large or small: From boards of multi-nationals to a group of buyers; from R&D to Facilities Management; from international consultancies to bakers.Practically everyone can benefit from the opportunity to visualise their future together and to see the adventure that awaits them. Paradoxically, this is most true of those who have got themselves into a position where they are ‘too busy or too stressed to think about it’.
To talk through how this might work for your organisation, please contact us.
toward a smaller shared vision
At this point, we may have created the impression that shared vision has to be big, but that is not so. It is great to have an overall vision to help everything point in the same direction. However, shared vision doesn’t have to start there. Many of the other elements you will encounter in this website also represent shared vision, but at a more detail level. If you are looking to align people around an event, a project, or even a meeting, you could take a look at these tools.Delivering on the shared vision
Once everyone has something they feel emotionally invested in wanting to see realised, it is vitally important to maintain and grow that passion within them. This is heavily influenced by:
- Frameworks that enable people to further develop their personal and team visions in support of the shared vision
- A grassroots culture that actively recognises, rewards and encourages progress toward the common purpose
- Leadership approaches that embrace and encourage people’s thinking and ideas in developing shared answers
- Collaborative methods that amplify people’s abilities and build teamwork and shared ownership for success
- Insight landscapes which capture and display people’s hopes and ideas for delivering the shared vision in an easily accessible and adaptive manner
To explore these ideas further, please click on the links above. Or feel free to contact us. We find our own thinking is continually sharpened and enriched by the questions people ask, and by the discussions that emerge from it.