Vivid Vision: A Remarkable Tool for Aligning Your Business Around a Shared Vision of The

by Cameron Herold

And it’s usually because the CEO has not laid out a clear map with a clear destination, so the employees don’t really know where they’re going.

The only way to have your team aligned—moving in the same direction at the same speed—is to develop a detailed vision of the future and share it with them.

This is what you need to do for your company. This is the Vivid Vision.

But a Vivid Vision is a three-dimensional world that you can step into and explore. It’s a world you can share with your team to create true alignment and amazing results. It’s a true road map that helps your team see where to go, so they can figure out how to get there.

No one else in your organization knows with any certainty what it is you want to build.

You are the problem, not them. When people show up for work, knowing—not guessing—exactly what their chief executive envisions for the company three years out, down to the minor details, they’re aligned. And aligned workers perform better than individuals merely operating in proximity toward a vague goal that might be a month or ten years out, not that it makes any difference either way.

One hallmark of a good company is the ability to promote from within, which leads to a culture of trust, dedication, and willingness.

Again, the reason companies spend so much time managing people, holding them accountable and running a permission-based system, is because nobody knows where they’re going.

The focus is on where you intend to be three years down the road, regardless of where you might be now.

The point of creating a Vivid Vision is to lean out into the future, to pretend you’re traveling in a time machine to a moment three years ahead. It’s dreaming where you want the company to be in every metric, from personnel to review to location to services, and working backward from there. Most companies do the opposite—they look at where they actually are and make designs based solely on that.

Thirty years ago, Microsoft had a BHAG to place a computer on every desktop.

When creating the Vivid Vision, don’t worry about how it is going to happen, only that it’s going to happen. It’s the CEO’s job to figure out where the organization is going. It’s the role of the leadership team to figure out how they will make the Vivid Vision happen.

After you set the BHAG, break it down into chunks. The chunks represent the individual steps in a process that will eventually get you from point A to the BHAG.

If your Vivid Vision is going to set the world on fire, at least as far as your business goes, then it has to rock the boat a little.

But when you head to a lake house or a mountain cabin, you’re away from horns and honks of rushing traffic outside the office building and the equally distracting pedestrian traffic inside. You want to leave the trite motivational posters, the ticking clock, the endless cubicles, and the fluorescent lights behind you. Getting away from your office means no telephones ringing, no office machinery humming, no repair technicians banging, no custodians sweeping, and no employees asking you questions. Even if you sit in your backyard enjoying the warmth of the sun, it’s better than writing your Vivid Vision on a plane or from your office.

Make it just you and a notepad, and maybe a meadow or a pond.

Wherever their zone of tranquility is, athletes who incorporate visualization techniques will go to that place to rehearse their performance, so that on game day, they merely duplicate what they have already witnessed themselves doing time and time again.

Start your Vivid Vision this way: calm, relaxed, and envisioning a world you’d love to help create and be part of some day.

Describe your marketing department, IT, finance, sales, and operations. Describe your culture, what your employees are saying about you, and what the media is writing about you. Describe the details of every area in your business until you’ve exhausted all the goals that are hiding in the back of your mind.

Try to keep the finished product to four pages of content or less. You’re going to send this out to potential and current employees, suppliers, and customers. Everyone is going to see this document, so you want to give people something more exciting than just a plain Word document.

After the group has read through the pages, you want each employee to circle any of the sentences or phrases that most excite and inspire them. Ask them to share their thoughts with the group.

By getting your people to think, “What if?” they become engaged and aligned.

I worked for a client years ago in Vancouver. As we did the internal rollout for his company, the CEO stood up and said, “About 15% of you will hate what you hear. You’re not going to like what the future has in store for you, but that’s OK. It’s probably the right time for you to quit.”