Overview

Over the years, I’ve had to facilitate the creation of a vision statement in custom workshops and standard courses. When working in standard courses the vision is done quickly, often to set up some other activity or learning. It doesn’t have to be perfect and just needs to be good enough to express an idea that people can rally around. The commitment to the vision only needs to last for a day or two. The Elevator Pitch template, from Geoffrey Moore, meets the need to generate a description of a future product, or vision.

Custom workshops, on the other hand, require a different approach to craft a meaningful vision for a product or organization.  Creating a vision that fits your context and environment is hard work and I’ve found it best to avoid the use of templates that ask people to fill in blanks.  Here’s a list of common challenges I’ve noticed, whether facilitating a session or trying to craft a vision myself:

1. People may have very different ideas of the definition of a vision.  Many conflate visions with either missions or product descriptions (current).  Clarifying this is important before starting the work and in facilitating the work.  Likewise, being able to detect if you’ve ended up with a mission or product description is useful.
2. Vision statements are future focused. Envisioning the future is typically an underutilized skill we’re seldom asked to use.  It often won’t come naturally because there’s no muscle memory to perform it.  Getting people into this headspace takes a little work.
3. Much like envisioning, finding the right words is also difficult for many of the same reasons.

What follows is a description of an activity I created, along with Denise Jarvie, to better support vision creation in small groups.

It should be noted that internet searches were performed periodically to look for existing solutions or guidance that could be leveraged.  Those failed to yield a workable solution, hence the results you see here.

Creating a Future Focused Vision in 5 Steps

I’ve run this activity a few times using small groups of 3-5 people and limiting the time to 20 minutes.  If you’ve got large groups of people, you can have them share out and combine their ideas from small groups to consolidate using the best of what’s found, similar to 1-2-4-All.

Before getting started, you’ll need some sort of working area similar to the one shown below.

Here’s a quick summary of the steps.

1. Start with the purpose or mission for your product or organization. Instruct the group not to spend a lot of time on this, but get something down that’s representative.
2. Specify a date in the future and ask the group to create an ideal future for your customers, represented as personas. The ideal future will be expressed by quotes from the different personas to capture what you hope they’ll be saying.
3. Reviewing the quotes from Step 2, what qualities or words stand out and capture the essence of the ideal future. Record those and limit your answers to six or less. We want to converge on a few key words that distill the future.
4. Now comes the hard part. From those words and quotes, draft a vision statement. It works well to have a few people writing their versions in parallel, then stopping to review each other’s work. You can find things you like from each other’s vision or things not to include.
5. Evaluate your vision and iterate on your ideas. Vision statements should be clear, future focused, and inspirational. Make sure you didn’t create a mission statement claiming what you intend to do or will always work towards.

There could be a step zero to get people to articulate the difference between mission and vision, and describe the benefits of each.

By Way of Example

The Scenario

This example is based on a team of product coaches whose customers are product leaders, such as product owners, product managers, and chief product offices.  Each of those roles has increasingly broader focus starting typically with one product and moving out to multiple products and eventually to a product organization.

Step 1 – Define Purpose/Mission

We wanted the mission to express an action we were continually taking and express the benefit of that work.  The result of that quick activity was “Help Product Leaders Maximize Their Potential to Build Great Products”.  We felt the use of a verb, “Help”, to start the statement helped express the action and “Build Great Products” captured the benefit.

Step 2 – Create an Ideal Future for Your Customers

Start by specifying your top customers, usually 2-3.  Determine a date a few years from now, either based on the input of the group or just choose one that’s 3-5 years into the future.

Have people brainstorm and write their ideas.  There is no debate here, just start contributing and see what gets generated.   Each contribution should read like a quote from the persona, representing that customer.  Using first person words like “my”, “I”, “we”, “us” to make the quote more realistic and avoid listing what you believe the product should do for them, a common trap.  

Here are a few examples:

• “We are investing in the right products”
• “My team is developing great products, our customers love”
• “I’m able to focus on strategy, confident in my team to provide input and deliver”

Alternatively, you can act this out with role play and improvisionation.  Just make sure you capture what’s said and from what perspective.  Make sure you have a good representation across the customers and take time to read through them all as you get ready to transition to the next step.

Step 3 – Identify the Qualities that Describe the Future

Reviewing the quotes from the ideal future.  What words do you notice?  There might be some that are particularly powerful or some that appear multiple times.  Pay attention to those.  There could also be synonyms or words that form a theme.  Find a few of these, but not so many that you can’t focus — somewhere between 3 and 6 should do the trick.  Write these down.

We came up with words like: High Trust, Alignment, Customers, Goals, Focus, etc.

Step 4 – Draft Your Vision Statement

Given the previous two steps, everyone should have a good idea of the qualities for their ideal future and what that might look like for different customers.  Now it’s time to craft a vision statement.  I recommend having at least a couple people independently write down something, while everything is fresh on their minds.  Read each other’s and see what you like or don’t like.  From there, draft a new vision statement that might combine some of those ideas together.

Step 5 – Evaluate and Iterate

You’ve probably already iterated once or twice by this time.  Make sure the vision statement is clear, future focused, and inspirational.  It should not be too wordy.  Make sure it’s not another mission statement.  You can do this by reviewing it against your mission statement created in step 1.  Try to avoid the use of a verb that made the mission statement appear as an ongoing activity.  It should describe the ideal future in one statement, as if you’re describing a place.

Ours was, “We are a unified company where everyone understands the customer and obsessively focuses on learning the right problems to solve and how through experimentation”.  For us, this met the criteria of a good vision statement we could work towards.  We arrived here at consensus and wanted something good enough, that would be supported by all.

The End Result

Here are the results of our work.  We ended up staying in the working area of Step 4 while completing Step 5.

Why It Works

We’ve had good success running this with several groups. Here are some of the reasons why we think it works:

• By writing down the mission first, you have a reference you can use to test your vision statement to make sure it’s distinct.  It’s also easier to let go of it because you’ve written it down.
• The ideal future step is essentially role play and improv.  Because they are quotes, you have to take the perspective of your customers.  You are having to imagine yourselves in that future.  You don’t want to rush this step as it can take a little bit to get in the right headspace.
• Because writing is hard, step 3 assists with finding a few key words before trying to draft your vision statement.
• Evaluating each other’s vision drafts and having some evaluation criteria (e.g. clear, future focused, inspirational, not a mission) helps iterate and improve towards a good first version you can adopt.  Make the evaluation criteria visible for reference.
• Because the activity is a bit long, 20 minutes, I tend to signal the halfway point and ask people to make sure they’re at least at step 3.
• The timebox, structure, and multiple perspectives from your group are what move this along quickly to its conclusion.

Summary

I hope that you will find this activity useful.  I’d love to hear about any success, suggestions, or alternatives you’ve discovered.  Vision statements are a powerful tool to help discussions about direction and alignment.  They become a necessary prerequisite for roadmapping, planning, and making decisions.