Story 3

Where We’re Going

A Vision Story

A vision is a picture of the future so compelling people want to go there with you.

Unfortunately, what passes for a vision today has been tainted by the well-intended but misguided output of off-site meetings and expensive consultants. xi The problem is exacerbated by the misperception that the only way to be memorable is to be ridiculously brief. And that’s why we’ve ended up with what amounts to vision sentences or, worse, vision phrases instead of vision stories.

For example, after weeks of deliberation, one organization I was part of articulated their five-year vision—to much fanfare—with the following five words: “40 and 5 in 5.” What that meant was that we wanted to reach $40 billion in sales and add five points to our market share over the next five years. Or, maybe it was to reach a 40 percent market share and add $5 billion in sales in five years. I can’t really remember. And even when I could, those arbitrary goals did very little to motivate me to do anything differently. And that’s the point. Brief doesn’t equal memorable, and it certainly doesn’t equal meaningful.

Here’s a better way I stumbled across: In 2002, I’d been assigned to lead a group of forecasters whose job was to predict the future sales of new products where I worked. But, since you can never predict the future perfectly, they knew their prediction would be wrong. They just didn’t know if it would be too high or too low, and by how much. To make matters worse, they were often undertrained and had forecasting models that were overly complicated, poorly documented, and based on outmoded data.

My job was to lead them through whatever changes were needed to fix all that. But the solution wasn’t something I could just do for them. It would require a lot of work on their part. My challenge was to lay out a vision and, hopefully, inspire enough of them to do the hard work necessary to get there. But instead of a vision phrase or a vision sentence or even a vision statement, I wrote them a vision story.

It started out like this:

Below is a picture of the future I’d like to help you create. It’s my vision of what a day in the life of a sales forecaster could be in the near future. Some of you may feel you’re already pretty close to this, and some may feel infinitely far away. Either way, I want to make this a vision we all share—either by adding your ideas to it or embracing it as is. Let me know what you think.

In the subject line of the email, I wrote “The Vision: A Day in the Life of a Sales Forecaster.” The story it contained introduced “Sherri, a sales forecaster two years in the future.” The story simply followed Sherri through a single day in her work life—what she did and the meetings she attended. And for the people reading it, it was clear how different her experience was from what they experienced day-to-day:

The story followed Sherri to meetings that she previously wouldn’t have been invited to because her opinion wasn’t valued as highly as it was now.

Instead of feeling uncertain when answering questions from her business partners, she felt confident, because she’d been more properly trained and her models were updated with the most recent data.

Instead of fumbling around in her forecast model trying to figure out how it worked and troubleshooting issues, she simply opened her new instruction manual and followed the instructions. Besides, the new model was a lot easier to figure out because it was so much simpler than the old one .

As the story continued, it became clear that she experienced none of the typical frustrations a forecaster would be familiar with.

The story closed at the end of the day when Sherri was walking out of a meeting. Two people thanked her for her great ideas and said that they liked this new leadership role the forecasters seemed to be playing in the business. The final words of the story read, “She hadn’t realized it before now, but she actually liked her job. It was more fun to come to work when you know what you’re doing and you’re having a big impact on results.”

The first response I got to the email was, “Wow! I want that to be my story two years from now. I’m in!” After a dozen or so more responses like that, I knew I’d stumbled onto something right with the story .

Tips to help you craft your own vision story

Decide who your audience is. Who are you writing the vision story for? Is it for management? The rank and file? Your investors? It might be several audiences, in which case you might need several vision stories. But for most companies, the goal of the vision is to inspire the broad set of employees.

Who or what will benefit most if your vision is achieved? Is it the employees? Stockholders? Customers? The environment? The community?

Choose a fictional character either from the group your audience is in or the group that stands to benefit from the vision. Ideally, they’re both the same group. But they don’t have to be, as long as your audience cares about the group that will benefit. This will be the main character of your vision story.

Sketch out what a typical day is like for them after your vision has been achieved.

Make sure to include the type of activities that are both important to your audience and heavily impacted by having achieved the vision.

What’s better about working at a company that’s winning in the marketplace (if that’s your goal)? Will employees be prouder to work there? Perhaps show your main character reading a flattering article about your company in Fortune.

What’s better about working at a company that’s growing sales and profits faster than ever before (if that’s your goal)? Will that mean bigger bonuses at the end of the year? Will it open up new job opportunities for your employees or create more challenging work? Show that in the story.

Conclude with a summation of how your main character feels about the world he or she is living and working in now compared to the way things were before.