Generating Vision

CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs must routinely craft business plans that clearly describe the company’s future and address trends they see converging. Product managers must ensure that product road-maps don’t get bogged down in iterations so that leap frog innovations take root. Every company’s future must integrate artificial intelligence, manage uncertainty and down-select from infinite choices. Publishing a pithy vision statement often fails to help employees realize their team’s full potential and anticipate future customer needs. This course will help you clearly define a vision of “where” your company is going that will outperform even an inspiring one.

Research demonstrates that companies with a long-term perspective tend to outperform those focused on short-term targets and quarterly goals. By taking a deep look into the future, leaders and employees can identify and mitigate potential blind spots and see patterns that can inhibit or drive growth.

The course will critique multiple company vision statement examples and why they often fail to be motivating. Brainstorming and future thinking must be focused and met with techniques and asking the right questions that when implemented can have a huge impact on the bottom line.

This course will help you to inspire your employees, team-members and all stakeholders through long-term thinking, visioning mindsets, strategic foresight, scenario planning and big idea generation. We will show you how to think long-term and what the many business benefits are. Too little time is allocated to dream big about the company’s future as long-term goals are quickly replaced by short term choices that holds back the full potential of the company. Leaders that don’t take the time to get the big ideas right and communicated will be rapidly replaced. This course will outline the clear differences between mission statements and strategic visioning so that management attention is routinely given towards thinking five to ten plus years into the future.

The danger is in “Short-termism” as too many managers get stuck in day to day thinking as incentives are aligned to think quarterly, small and avoid projects that will take time to deliver bottom-line impact. Visioning has become an essential element of business strategy. Long-term perspective drives success. Yet vision statements often leave employees confused and and even disengaged; retention and relevancy is on the line.

The most clever vision statements often fail to motivate employees if they can’t make sense out of the words and then see themselves within the images, concrete language story telling about the future. Vision statements are often a “check the box” crutch that leaders lean on when they are unable to imagine and get the big ideas right. This course will show that vision statements were never enough to inspire employees to join nor stay with your company. This course will bring you new frameworks, tools and templates that push leaders and mangers towards long-term thinking and planning that drives significant economic opportunity for all stakeholders.

Less than 10% of leader’s self-identify as visionary, according to the Barrett Culture Values Center.

Leaders at all levels struggle with vision and visioning for products, teams, and entire companies. Short-term incentives and behaviors inhibit exploration of the trends that are converging and may disrupt your industry. Leaders often default to generating vision statements that often fail to inspire. Yet, employees and team members crave vision and knowing how their work and longer-term career paths connect to that of the group or entire company. Vision statements were never enough to motivate collective action. while a mission statement may describes why your organization exists, vision can’t be captured in vision statement. The course examines how companies like AARP, Patagonia, Amazon and others use future-back planning, strategic foresight, visioning and long-term thinking to create a north star that pulls leaders up up from the inertia of day to day execution. We will explore the power of and dangers in analogy that held Microsoft back from growth. The course will also examine how nonprofit health care platforms like the Mayo Clinic engages in strategic planning that employs codified beliefs about the future (“the patient will see you now) and how they are looking fifty years into the future of healthcare.

What you'll learn

• That vision statements are insufficient to motivate employees and their teams and that “getting the big ideas” right and communicated is essential to answering “where are we going"?” as a company.
• High quality examples of companies that encourage long-term thinking and routinely confront the "short-termism" that hinders R&D, innovation and employee connection.
• Understanding the difference between purpose/mission statements and vision statements, and the key questions that vision answers.
• How to engage leadership teams and employees in shaping a long-term goals that incorporate the sustainable energy and ESG commitments your company supports.
• Step by step guidance on how to dream big and generate the "big ideas," that must get done. We will go far beyond writing a vision statement and teach you the mindsets and skill sets that generate motivating initiatives that foster company culture’s of teamwork and collaboration.
• How to avoid "blurry” vision statements by using concrete and sensory language and imagery linked to storytelling and thoughtful repetition.
• Connecting vision and big ideas to business processes, including strategic planning, company core values, company mission, budgeting, innovation, company culture, new partnerships, employee growth and well-being, ESG commitments and more.
• Understand the connection between vision and agile development and product road maps so that product managers can break away from versioning and move towards visioning — while being ethical and transparent about progress.