One of the best pieces of advice I ever received came from my mother. Whenever I was starting out on a journey or trying to tackle some big undertaking, she’d remind me to “start as you aim to go on”.
What did she mean by this? Simply put, she meant to take time for strategising, for planning, for reflection and for some forethought. She was telling me to “think with the end goal in mind” which was another of her valuable pieces of advice. In essence, she was advising me to look at the finish line and reverse engineer my project, initiative or goal, stepping backwards through all the steps until I got to the beginning. In her world, we had to go backwards before we could go forwards.
What exactly does this process look like though? When it comes to creating a vision for a business, most people start with strategy: your mission or WHY, your philosophy or guiding principles and some kind of a manifesto or statement of beliefs. These documents are certainly critical because they are the ones that will carry you through your uncertainties and guide you in your darkest hours. However, if you’ve started your strategic plan with only the aforementioned documents, you’ve missed a very crucial step: visioning.
What is visioning?
Let’s start with what it isn’t. It’s not just writing down some blah blah paragraph about some esoteric ideals which sound great, but that no one including you really understand. Visioning is actually about literally seeing the finish line, in your mind’s eye, before you ever start.
What does visioning look like?
When you start visioning, you will allow yourself to visually see things as you’d like for them to be: really imagine a day in the life of yourself and your business. There is going to be a personal element to this exercise as well as a business one because the two really are inseparable. Every area of your life affects the other.
This exercise should start off with you getting out of bed in the morning. What do you eat for breakfast? What does your house look like, where is it located, who lives there with you, what takes up your time and do you exercise first or rush straight into work? You leave the house and go to your car (or do you have a car)? If so, what kind of car is it? Is it leased or owned? Is it private or company? What model, year, colour, gas mileage, etc. does it get? After that you arrive to the office. Did you commute for hours, minutes or not at all? Did you perhaps walk or ride your bike? Maybe you live in the same building as your office or maybe you work from your home office so you never left the house? Do you have the corner office or do you work with others in an open floor plan? Do you have employees, a virtual team, do you work with contractors or are you totally solo? What kind of work do you want to take this year and what kind of people do you want to work with (both employees and customers)? Do you want to work from one geographic location or many? Are you brick and mortar or are you strictly online? Do you take a break in the middle of the day for lunch or do you eat through it at your desk? Do you exercise at lunch or after work or not at all? Do you have pets? Do they go to the office with you? How about kids? Do you take many / any vacations and how do you manage their school holidays? By now I guess you get the idea.
After you have your whole life envisaged, start to categorise everything into similar items and then prioritise them by their level of importance to you and how immediately you want to address them (just like short and long term goals). Once you have that list of items – take a quick inventory against your actuals. Do they match up or do you maybe still drive a Hummer where all your visioning is screaming Prius? Once you can see it all clearly, you have to write it down. 1) Because your memory will fail and 2) because what doesn’t get written down, doesn’t get measured.
After you have your vision versus actuals list prioritised by those items that are most important to focus on, start to put together action plans for how you’re going to make those changes happen. Using our auto example from above – you should immediately set a task to get together the financials on the Hummer, look at selling it or trading it in and start shopping for a Prius. Set yourself budgetary parameters and a deadline for when the transition should occur and then wash, rinse and repeat until you have finished your entire list.
Once that is completed, you will write out a final document where you state all the items you are going to accomplish and put them into monthly, quarterly or yearly (3, 5, and 10) categories. Lastly, decide how often you’re going to follow up and what “finished” and/or success looks like for each item you identify. The last bit is just the execution and the follow through.
Regardless, whether or not you’ve finished your 2015 comprehensive plan, I’d encourage you to make sure visioning is an active part of it and start this year as you aim to go on.