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Saturday 31 of July, 2010

Crystal Clear Vision

Go to Meaning Making
Go to What Do We Mean?
See also Meaning Making Words
Go to Einstein And Bohr
Go to The Outcomes in Visual Scenarios
Go to The Outcomes in Visual Journeys
Go to John Dewey
Go to How meaning is at the core of creating a vision

"Picture yourself in a boat on the river..."

It's hard to remember a case when we haven't had to create a vision. We will get a specific request - the pressing need for a vision we all share! Imagine a strategy or a transformation without one. Chaos.

See the The Meaning Making Machine

Discovering New Meaning

Discovery Asks what NEW meaning could we create? 4D™

Developing New Meaning

Development Discusses what NEW meaning should we create? 4D™

Deciding New Meaning

Decision Decides what NEW meaning will we create? 4D™

Deploying New Meaning

Deployment Ensures that the NEW meaning we created gets deployed 4D™

Go to: 4D™, The 'Pixar' Of Consulting, A Vision Model

This shared vision is often tough to arrive at or conjur on many levels - as discussed in the articles on meaning. Getting the concept of a vision across amongst a few people is hard - to a lot of people it can be almost impossible or take many years. This is because its both intangible (and in most cases) still a partly formed idea. It's most likely also a collection of aims and ambitions rather than a physical 'thing'. Its probably an emerging thing too - never really been fully defined. But imagine the confusion for everyone trying to achieve it!

From our years of building them the goal is to describe a vision as part symbolic, part physical and part principle based. What this means is different in each case but some rules apply within Structured Visual Thinking.

Because by the time we get to construct a Future Vision we will know the outcome and metrics we expect we can build in the foundations quickly. The vision will contain some obvious fundamentals. The power of co-creating a Vision is to integrate the big themes and energy of the team within a representation that inspires and also weaves the capability required. Part symbol of intent and part physical 'machinery'.

SVT Scenarios are the outcome of co-creating shared meaning. We build this shared meaning in teams through facilitation, conversation and visualization. As a result everyone now shares meaning. This creates shared intention and definition over every word and every story.

This changes behavior.

Slaying the killer words.

Every 'Vision' should illustrate the intangible ideas and overcome the traditional pitfalls of sloppy definition. These are killer words if not dealt with this way.

The Killer Words:

Mission. Aim. Outcome. Future State. Strategic Vision. Scenario. Values. Principles. Standards. Objectives. Words like these.

We use the word scenario almost interchangably with vision because a vision is also a possible scenario. We could easily call a journey a scenario. We could describe a scenario by creating a Journey. The journey could explain the Vision.

The point is that as long as we are all in agreement of what we mean then we all head in the same direction. If not then everyone is heading in a different direction. Wasting valuable resources. The 'Vision' of anything means to faithfully represent it. The vision needs to capture the spirit of the intention and by doing so inspire the hearts and minds of others.

The key objective must be to carry the full meaning of the vision and for it to become a mission for everyone involved to deliver it. We visualise and co-create in order to enable the team to fully understand every moving part so that it can properly implement the actions to get there and so accomplish its aims.

For most situations we need to 'ground' the vision in reality. This will involve the very real components of infrastructure, buildings, people working in teams, processes, systems and governance procedures. The great prize of creating a vision is when these very real building blocks are shown to enable the dream and the idea that will now motivate newcomers. The work we need to put in is therefore a mixture or pragmatic thinks like capability and competence with emotion and passion for higher things.

Journeys and Scenarios:

We build Journeys to tell the stories of sequences, steps, events and happenings over time. This helps to explain the lifecycle of almost anything. We will populate the journey with scenes to explain to the audiences what the situation is at this event or to illustrate change of circumstance or situation.

In SVT Live these events are interactively enabled to allow viewers to see change or contribute to a suggestion about possible future operation or process for example.

The act of co-creation

Teamwork involves conversation, conversation discusses the meaning by words strung together to describe ideas. These ideas are developed into new representations of the meaning but this time 'live' and together as if we are carving a new totem pole of the future. A representation of our belief in what we all aim for.

Co-Creation

As our friend Francis Gouillart and Venkat Ramaswamy point out -

"Many companies are in retrenchment mode in this down-cycle. In their renewed attention to cost, they are reverting to the quality and re-engineering paradigm of the last century, attempting to take cost out by streamlining business processes, shortening cycle times, or implementing enterprise resource planning software packages. While this approach is helpful to create a performance baseline, the traditional efficiency reserves in most organizations have been tapped out. Most of these companies will die completely healed."

"A more fruitful avenue is co-creation. In general, organizations bite off more than they can chew. They think of themselves as having to control and optimize a wider set of one-sided processes than is necessary. Companies want to single-handedly deliver predictable outputs from those processes using only their own resources, failing to recognize that people at the receiving end of those processes no longer want to be passive, but want to engage in the design of the process and the co-creation of their experience. And they're willing to do the work required to get there, therefore allowing companies to externalize some of that cost."

"The cost saving opportunity lies in letting go. The two areas best known for co-creation are at the two extremes of the value chain: in customer-facing processes (like Apple) and in the product or service development area (like IBM). We routinely see companies able to cut their marketing, advertising, sales, or customer service costs by 30% or more by involving customers in the design and delivery of those processes."

"We witness the same order-of-magnitude improvement when companies engage third-parties in their product and service development processes."

"Ultimately, though, the greatest gain lies in applying the principles of co-creation inside the company. Individual functions inside a company suffer from the same evil as the company as a whole. They try to do too much on their own, attempting to create value by defining themselves as "process owners" responsible for delivering a repeated and predictable output to their "process customers," typically another function in the firm. Whenever sourcing views manufacturing as its client rather than as a co-creation partner, it inevitably generates cost for itself and for manufacturing, and destroys some experience value for both."

"The same is true when an actuary in an insurance company views marketing as its client, when a chemist formulates a product "for" marketing, or when the Human Resources department proves coaching services to its management team. Most cost to be "engineered out" lies at the intersection between company functions. Eliminating this cost requires setting up platforms that engage both parties in a dialogue where the processes on both sides are made transparent. These platforms enable a new dialogue between the parties and lead to the development of new experiences that benefit both - at a fraction of the cost."

"Unlike in the old re-engineering and quality paradigm, these platforms do not attempt to create a deterministic process that optimizes the flow of goods and information between functions based on some perceived need. Instead, they enable faster, more contextual decisions that dramatically reduce cost and improve cycle time by tapping creativity on both sides in continuous fashion."

"These platforms sometimes require some form of information technology investment, but they often involve a simple reconfiguration of basic day-to-day interactions between people.In that sense, co-creation is the new frontier of productivity."

Co-Creation and Visualization

If we break down what we mean by co-creation and visualization there are some obvious benefits. Its important to explain the process of developing a scenario, a vision.

The word dialogue is used today to describe a great variety of forms and practices that have something to do with furthering understanding between groups or individuals. In common language, dialogue simply means a conversation between two or more persons. However, the etymology of the word, as Bohm (1996) was quick to point out, suggests a deeper meaning. “Dialogue” comes from the Greek “dialogos:” “Dia” doesn’t mean “two” – it means “through; and “logos” means “the word.”

‘’’Thus, implied in the etymology of the word is the stream of meaning that can flow through a group engaged in the process of dialogue.’’’ Bohm was aware of the potential of dialogue to facilitate shared meaning between a group, and hold the group together in a relatively coherent whole. He was also keenly aware of the limits of thought, and the “tacit infrastructure” of conditioned consciousness that can obstruct coherence, but I will get to those concerns in a moment. The cohesive potential of dialogue, in which meaning can flow through a group, is in distinct contrast from “discussion,” which is etymologically related to the words “percussion” and “concussion,” which breaks things up (into dysfunctional fragments), or as we might say today, “breaks things down” for purpose of analysis of the separate parts (Bohm, 1996).

See Einstein And Bohr

Images that describe scenarios

These are our representations of the 'real-world' activities and environments we work in. We do all this in the pursuit of collaborative discovery, development, decision and deployment of strategy, transformation and change in complex environments. These are scenarios.