Five Steps on Creating a Compelling Vision

Hi there and welcome. It’s Kerstin Jatho here from 4Seeds Consulting, a transformational coach who shifts people from languishing to flourishing. In this video, I want to provide you with five steps on creating a compelling vision.

Antonio Damasio said people are not thinking machines who feel, but emotional machines who think. And if you think about that sentence for a moment, what he is saying is that we make a huge portion of our decisions with our emotions first. And yes, that applies even to the most logical, analytical person. We often feel the decision first, and then we logically substantiate it. So, we often need our emotions to align with something before it makes sense and we go for it.

If you compare that to a vision statement, it means that we need to connect the emotion to a vision statement. And right now, organisations are in a big drive of realigning and overhauling their vision statements as an organisation. However, does your team actually have a vision statement? Do they know what it is? And if not, how about creating one? Because it’s very powerful for them to emotionally connect to it. And if anybody’s done vision statements, they know that it can be quite a boring wordsmithing process of trying to find the right words, and getting it fine-tuned. And that sometimes loses a lot of the fun and the energy in it.

Also, as leaders, you don’t have to come up with a vision statement on your own. Do it with your teams. And that is really powerful because the quicker you involve your teams, the more they are engaged in it, and it comes alive. You don’t have to convince them that this is the statement. If you bring it from a push-down perspective of this is the vision statement, and I need you to exercise this or live it up, you’ll get a lot of resentment, pushback, most probably even procrastination.

Five steps on creating a compelling vision statement with your team is to:

Step 1:

Create a rough outline of the vision statement, but really a fuzzy outline.

Step 2:

Then get input from your team, perhaps even divide them up into groups that they can decide, discuss, and debate this vision statement.

Step 3:

Let them next come and present their ideas to each other because that stimulates way more conversation and consensus of what the actual vision statement is at the end.

Step 4:

The fourth step is that you need to hit some kind of a consensus, but because you have involved everybody, they have had time to think about it, you’ve put them into groups or breakout rooms, and they’ve all participated in it, you will likely have quite a quick consensus on a unanimous vision statement.

Step 5:

And the fifth step, which I think is just nice and adds a special touch to it, is to create a visual of the vision statement, create an image and then hang it up in public areas within your organisation. Even if it’s the kitchen where people can see it all the time and are reminded that yes, that’s our vision as a team. That’s what we are here for. That’s the impact we’re making.

So, vision statements are exceptionally powerful. Our brains need roadmaps of where they are right now, and where they are going. Vision statements provide that. So, it can, as I say, be a statement as well as an image, a picture because we connect with both as human beings.

Go on the journey with your team and create compelling vision statements. They will make a huge difference and you know what, they’re quite fun.

Over to you for sharing your comments and experiences.

When last did you revisit your team vision statement?