In the spirit of the New Year, this week’s post relates to our visions for a better future. Vision is central to leadership. As leaders, we perceive possible desirable futures and take actions to co-create them. A great vision can both suggest the actions needed to achieve it, and unify and inspire organization members to take intelligent, collaborative action towards the achievement of that future.
In its fullest sense, vision involves a dialogue between our rational-sequential “left-brains” and our holistic/visionary “right brains.” (It’s probably no coincidence that our capacity for sight is associated with the “right brain”).
Because Western culture is built on rationalism, we Westerners (especially engineers, accountants, MBAs, academics, etc.) tend to excel in rational, sequential, incremental logic. Analysis and logic are the big tools in our tool bag and we tend to reach for them whenever we have a job to do. (Guilty!)
Therefore, it is not surprising that we sometimes take this approach to vision. For example, on several occasions, I have seen corporate leaders express vision in terms of financial targets. While financial targets are important, rational-conceptual goals, the limitations of financial target as vision are 1) it doesn’t include much information on how the vision is to be achieved; and 2) as studies have shown, for most organizational members, money has real practical limitations as a motivator.
However, when we also engage our right brains, we can not only imagine possible futures, but we can gain insights as to how these futures were achieved. Such is the power of our right brains, which can invent entire worlds for us in our dreams. Video game/virtual reality designers are still trying to approximate and imitate that kind of computing power.
As is the case with many of our dreams, not all of our visions are reliable and achievable. Here is where our rational facilities shine. What parts can be used? Does your imagination suggest any areas for additional research? What good ideas can we take away from this exercise?
And, because this is dialogue, we can also ask additional questions that draw on the creative resourcefulness of our right brains, such as, “What would be needed to really make this work?” Or: “What’s missing, that if added, would solve this problem?”
In sum, to really delve into vision, we play in the educated imagination, and develop some constructive dialogue between our rational and non-rational cognitive capacities.
A whole related topic is to achieve this in groups (done correctly, we can achieve creativity “on steroids” 😉 To gain the benefits of creative synergy, we must be able to “play well together” and then be rigorous in challenging ideas to see what can work, while maintaining constructive, collaborative relationships. More on this another time…
A New Year’s Practice
1. Pick one area of your life, or organization, and instead of focusing on its present limitations, imagine how you would like it to be. Do this just for fun, in the spirit of play. Think about what it would look like, feel like. … By engaging all of your senses in your vision, you help facilitate the shift.
Tip: If the answer comes to you automatically in a way that you have thought of it many times before, you have not yet tapped into your imagination. Think: constructive daydreaming. If this doesn’t come easily, you can warm up to the process by first remembering a past success in as much detail as possible, and then imagining a positive scene that may be happening somewhere in the present.
What do you see? Are there any elements of your vision that surprise you?
Feel free to ask questions of your vision. As we will discuss in future posts, questions are one of the most powerful ways you can get your imagination to work for you.
At the end of the process, consider what useful new insights or ideas you might take away from the exercise. How might you put these new ideas or insights into action?
