Envision, A Future Worth Choosing
I have been on a bit of a Robin Williams movie kick. I love Robin Williams movies. He was a comedic genius ~ his creativity and timing were simply unmatched. His dramatic turns were amazing.
I started out watching Aladdin because my oldest granddaughter had a tap solo this year to Friend Like Me and after watching her perform it several times, I was drawn to re-watch Aladdin. Once I did, it drew me to others, Mrs. Doubtfire followed by The Birdcage. After those, I drifted into his serious movies.
While watching the opening classroom scene of Dead Poets Society, where “John Keating” says, “No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.” Later in the film, there is a scene where he jumps up onto the desk and says, “I stand upon my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way.” I sat up and thought, OMG! Visioning! He is talking about doing a visioning process.
Now, I am all but certain that neither Tom Schulman, who won an Oscar for “Best Original Screenplay” nor Robin Williams, who was nominated but did not get an Oscar for Dead Poets Society ever *once* considered either a strategic planning or visioning process before, during or after the making of the film … but those lines are exemplary of the process when done right.
Visioning is the part in the process where we can change our world - or at least our future world view - and we must look at things in a different way. Visioning or Envision is the next point in the Detrick Compass™ framework to dive into.
As I start this, I am reminded of a conversation I had with a fellow Election Day volunteer. He was telling me about his small business and I was telling him about the Detrick Compass™ . The conversation quickly turned to “I’ve never done any of that because I’m a small guy, not a big corporate outfit. I have never even written a “business plan.” A dagger! Heal my little business person heart!
I did well, I mean, my jaw didn’t even hang open! I recovered quickly to tell him about our small eleven-employee construction company we had over thirty years ago and the value we gained from these processes and how valuable they also were for business owners I worked with doing business valuations in preparation to sell their businesses.
Done well and appropriately, a visioning process can make a huge difference in the life-cycle of an enterprise be it large or small, for profit or nonprofit, sole prop or publicly-held.
These processes can and do get a bad rep because they can be far too conceptual and “woo woo.” But, Envision is not about dreaming abstractly. It is the work of getting clear about the future state and the next meaningful destination toward True North — clearly enough to recognize it, understand why it matters, face what it will cost, and know when the conversation has shifted from where/why into how. During the Orient point, we realized that looking squarely at the brutal truth of the reality in front of you is critical and Envision does not abandon that reality; it carries it forward.
The shift from Orient’s “where are we really?” is a crucial step. A future built on fantasy about the current state is not vision. It is wishful thinking. Now in Envision we ask: given what we now know, where are we trying to go — and why is that destination worth choosing? We also have to be clear-eyed about what will this future cost us, and are we willing to pay that price?
Orient tells you the truth about what exists. Envision asks what future is actually worth building from that truth.
Visioning can get lots of groans from the crowd because the process often ends up with a future state that is so different, so many steps ahead of existing, that without defined stops along the way, most people just can’t see it. I call the ultimate destination True North. For some people and enterprises, their True North feels a universe away; for others, it is much closer. In a later piece, I will spend some real time on this concept.
For now though, at its core, True North is the deepest “why.” Destinations are meaningful places along the journey that move the enterprise toward True North. Some destinations may be visible from the beginning. Sometimes the next destination is all you can see; you have to reach it before the next one comes into view. The journey to True North can remain steady if you have a compass - even when the road disappears.
There will be rare times when the landscape for your business changes so quickly and so radically you will feel utterly lost. March 2020 anyone? My organization was in the first quarter of the first year of a three-year strategic plan. Suddenly, the road was just gone. But, we still had our compass to help us with the journey toward our vision and we were able to pivot to the new course.
Every business’ “why” will vary wildly - there is no approved hierarchy of worthy visions. For some business owners, the question is what do we ultimately want from our life, and how does this business get us there? Perfect vision, 20/20.
An enterprise may care about scale, family financial security, exceptional craft, community impact, or something else entirely. The work of Envision is not to make the “why” sound noble. The work is to make it honest: define what matters, don’t prescribe what *should* matter. You need to own your “why” after surfacing enough possible variables that the people defining the future can consciously say either “yes, that matters” or “no, I genuinely do not care about that.” I do caution though, before putting a period after “I don’t care,” ask, are there trade-offs or costs that come with choosing not to value it? If the answer remains “yes, and we accept those costs,” that is a legitimate answer.
Make sure the destination is big enough to make the cost of the journey worth it. “What will be meaningfully different when we arrive?” is not asking whether something changed. It asks whether arriving at the destination, and ideally the journey toward it, meaningfully moves the enterprise toward True North. If arrival does not meaningfully change anything in relation to True North, the destination may not be big enough.
I’m sure you have heard the quote, “the journey is the destination.” In business, as in everyday life, a good destination creates meaningful moments before you arrive.
The destination identified does not have to be the ultimate endpoint. It may be the next required way-station. You don’t have to have the whole journey envisioned, just the next meaningful place. Because once you are there, you can take a breath. Then keep going.
How do you know you have gotten to your destination? Many visioning destinations aren’t like arriving at the vacation hotel and receiving a glass of bubbly after a ride-share, two planes, a shuttle and a bus. A destination should be clear enough that the team can recognize meaningful progress and arrival, but Envision does not always require a “ta da” moment with a finite, easily definable endpoint, or even require a finished measurement system to begin. Sometimes the measurement tool or process does not yet exist.
It may start out like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s quote about obscenity, “I know it when I see it.” The future state may be clear enough that “we will know it when we see it” is a legit definition, provided that phrase is the result of real process work, not an excuse for vagueness or not spending the time to analyze it.
Once, during a planning/visioning session, we were trying to find a performance indicator for “higher expectations for parent’s and child’s educational attainment” in order for our team to implement the processes. To do so, they needed to have a shared language, questions they could ask, and behavioral signals they could recognize. I was reminded of our family rule about “extra credit” assignments. Our belief was there is no such thing. “Extra credit” is an assignment, thus it is an expectation - not because the extra points themselves mattered, but because the expectation was that learning and stretching beyond the minimum mattered. At that planning point, our team did not have a measurement for that outcome, but we felt like we had enough to begin.
Bottom line - and truly, this conversation belongs in Design - if the metric does not yet exist, define the outcome clearly enough that people can still recognize it, talk about it, and act in alignment with it. Then move forward.
Earlier, I mentioned being clear-eyed about the cost. It is easy to say “this is the future we want” when nobody has named what it will cost. This parallels the non-negotiables work in Orient where you know something is truly a value when you are willing to pay a cost for it.
The companion idea for Envision is: you know how seriously you want a future when you understand what it is likely to cost and still choose it. Price is also more than simply money.
Costs that should be looked at are broad:
- Leadership cost: what will this require of leaders personally and professionally?
- Staff cost: role changes, workload, uncertainty, skill demands, departures. Remember from Orient? Silence did not mean alignment. Staying does not mean choosing the future. Organizational change can materially alter roles, expectations, and career paths. Leaders should acknowledge those human consequences and manage transitions clearly and humanely.
- Customer/business cost: disruption, temporary service impacts, revenue or customer loss, operational trade-offs.
- Relationship/reputation cost: partners, funders, board members, public perception, online criticism, stakeholder strain.
- Self-identity cost: what part of who we believe we are might this future require us to release or redefine?
You must make a critical distinction: some costs are the price of moving toward the future. Other costs would require betraying True North or an established non-negotiable. When you clarify the future, don’t sanitize what that future will require. You can have, do, or be anything you want — as long as you are willing to put in the work and pay the cost.
Having said that, you cannot predict every cost. The point is to be clear-eyed about those you can reasonably foresee so predictable pain is not later treated as proof that the destination was wrong.
When you are in the process of Envision, how do you know you are done? In nearly all cases, when the conversation becomes all about the barriers, your envisioning is done. Now you are talking yourself out of it. “Well, we can’t do that because,” “that’ll never work because,” or “it’s impossible,” are questions about feasibility and route. Barriers belong at the next point in the framework, Design, unless they are proven to invalidate the destination itself.
You also have to be clear on the difference between the destination and the mechanisms of the process - how, structurally, will this work? That distinction also helps mark the Envision → Design boundary.
Some questions that often arise at this juncture *do* stay inside Envision: “But that would change who we are,” “That’s not who we are,” “If we do that, are we still the enterprise we intend to be?” Those questions test the “rightness” of the destination and the identity cost.
Keep digging until you know whether something is a genuine True North conflict, a real identity trade-off, or a sacred cow. Feasibility objections test the route; identity objections test the destination. Even a legitimate identity objection does not automatically disqualify the destination. Sometimes changing who the enterprise is is the point.
Envision creates enough clarity to know what must be true. Design determines how to make it true.
Envision should include enough pressure-testing to make sure the future state is not based on a false assumption. Questions may include: Is someone already solving this? Is there a direct competitor, substitute, adjacent model, or technology already delivering the outcome? Is our True North so narrow that a market or technology shift could make the enterprise a one-trick pony? How vulnerable is this True North or destination to changes in the world around us?
For that last question - context matters. A community-based service model may be worth replicating locally even if it exists in 1,000 other places. Look at Chambers of Commerce; some communities support multiple versions. A global manufacturer cannot assume that “nobody in Chicago does this” translates into “there is no competition” if companies in China, South Korea, Canada, or California already solve the same problem.
A compelling True North does not automatically create a compelling enterprise opportunity. A very narrow True North is not inherently a strategic problem, but unexamined narrowness creates fragility. If the thing becomes obsolete, leadership may have to rebuild and pivot quickly.
A point I want to make clear about this process: during Envision a shared future does not require everyone to care for the same reason. People sometimes have to see the big picture first so they can find the part of it that matters to them. Alignment does not require identical motives or identical participation. Some stakeholders may only get to: “I can see it. I don’t really like it, but I can see it, and I can participate.”
Begrudging participation can eventually create better questions and different forms of engagement. Holding hands and singing Kumbaya is not required during or after Envision.
The final test for Envision: is it worth it? Truly - is it worth it?
What Envision is not: a lofty vision-statement exercise, a demand for social impact, a finished implementation plan, a guarantee that everybody likes the destination, or permission to ignore cost. It is a deliberate choice about the future, grounded in reality.
For your Envision process, “Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary."
Coming next: Design, the next point in the Detrick Compass™ framework where we turn the direction found here in Envision into a coherent strategy. Design identifies the choices, priorities, sequencing, structures, systems, and investments required to move forward.
In the meantime, have a thought, question, or perspective this raised for you? I’d love to hear it.