People talk about vision all the time. It is often misunderstood and taken out of context. They think it is for annual planning and boardroom activities. They think of vision as some lofty goal that could be characterized by statements like this:
Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others. – Jonathan Swift
What we find though in smaller projects vision is still needed. It provides the “True North” for a project. Without it, we typically have a lack of direction and/or different interpretations of it. Robert Fritz uses structural tension, Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline uses creative tension when discussing visioning. The vision forms the gap between itself and current reality. It is what we use to drive us to engage in meaningful action to close the gap. The better defined each extreme is, the easier it is to close the gap.
In order to carry a positive action, we must develop here a positive vision. – Dalai Lama
Adapted from the book:The Skilled Facilitator: A Comprehensive Resource for Consultants, Facilitators, Managers, Trainers, and Coaches
Organizations more closely follow the laws of complex adaptive systems. Success in complex adaptive systems means fit with the environment or continuous adaption to an ever changing set of circumstances rather than trying to close a gap of the specific ideal that may become irrelevant during the journey toward it. By focusing on fit, change emerges one interaction that time. It is not dependent on a predetermined detail design of a future state. Each decision changes a landscape, and the future has generated through a complex process of evolution among the individual participants. The result is organizations that are sustainable over time under adverse conditions, concentrating on growth and agility rather than any particular end state. They place a premium on attending to relevant information and improvising to respond rapidly to changing conditions.
Mary Catherine Bateson writes the jazz improvisation is an appropriate metaphor for creating success. Each of us works by improvisation, discovering the shape of our creation along the way, rather than pursuing a vision already defined. The biographies make a convincing case that in our rapidly changing world, more is achieved by evolving of life decision by decision, opportunity by opportunity, challenge by challenge, based on a few clear principles. To the extent that there is a vision, it is emergent and highly unstable. So if both the personal and organizational levels, the role vision is less clear and more complex than much of the literature suggests.
These two paragraphs explain the process of how most marketing campaigns or as I like to call them marketing experiments should play out. It is an iterative and emergent process that yields the best results. I find most people, feel very uncomfortable with this idea. They think we are making up the future as it unfolds. It goes against having a plan and staying on plan.
I think it is not the iterative process that hinders people, but the lack of a powerful vision. The idea of vision is not a sales forecast. Vision statements should include purpose and values. It is about how we can profitably provide increased value (socially, emotionally, functionally) to customers and the way we will go about it. You might even call it a scenario of the future.
Suggestion: Don’t forget to define the current state. Having both clearly define will speed up your progress toward the future.
Often for a product launch or a marketing campaign you may simply ask a team/group to write a press release about the outcome. This is one of the simplest methods of providing scope or a vision statement. The purpose is not just to have one, but to have a shared interpretation among the team of the vision.
The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision. – Helen Keller