Once More Unto the Change

Do you have visions? Dreams of what the future could look like?

You should. You better.

When I say vision I don’t mean some crap ass mission statement about being the best. I mean envisioning a perfect future state. Whether for a small or large project, for your team, for your company, for your own job, you need to have visions.

Even Misfits need vision. Even if they are abstract and hard to define. Can you see it? Good. Then start talking about what you see (or writing about it if that is better for you). Maybe at first you’ll have a hard time describing it. That’s OK. Bounce it off people. They’ll poke holes. That’s OK, too. Every new concept has holes to fill in.  If you have passion for the vision, let that shine through.

And then start telling your customer about the vision. Start selling your customer on the vision, on the possibilities. Don’t confuse this with telling them what to do. This is about opening their eyes to opportunity. The what to do will come later. Create the desire first.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

So we have desire. Now we can put the shared vision to work. As we take our first steps we can look ahead to the vision and ask where are we trying to go, what are we trying to accomplish and then finally we can ask what are the very first steps to move in that direction. Having that vision means we don’t have to have some detailed plan on how to get there. We just have to keep taking the next best and available step toward the vision.

Knowing the destination will allow us to make a wider range of choices, to use more discretion in concocting actions and behaviors that are conscience of the ever changing environment around us. We’re agile. We’re not tied down to the baggage of a plan concocted long before enough information was available to make good choices.

We have to get used to making directional, non-linear choices. And for many of us the only way to get used to that is to start doing it and working through the discomfort. This is important because we’ll never each a perfect future state and we have to learn to be comfortable that.

And sometimes we’ll be wrong. That’s why it’s uncomfortable. That’s OK. The advantage in going step by step by step is that if we are diligent at the wheel we can never get to far off track. And we always learn more from mistakes. It’s kind of like managed play time. But instead it’s managed mistake making.

I was reading an article the other day about re-inventing the public library. The author basically stated that if we as library managers are not making mistakes we’re not pushing hard enough to keep up with the changing times.

We have to push ourselves into discomfort and risk, knowing that our vision is our safety net. That is the ticket to the future.

As to how to cultivate visions, that belongs to a different post.