Some of you are seriously considering skipping this entire chapter – the words “outcomes” and “measurable” don't sound like ideas you want to think about too much.

Keep reading and give us a chance to change your mind.

Here is the vision statement of a large organization that we came across recently (the names have been changed to protect the innocent):

Be the global leader in customer value.

This statement is frankly nothing more than a collection of words that say nothing about the core mission of the organization. What's worse, it probably took weeks or months to craft, and it's highly likely there was an expensive contract with a consultant to provide expert assistance.

We can laugh, but most of us have been on one of these kinds of groups. With the benefit of hindsight, we can't believe we were part of this kind of process. How did it happen? It starts with the best of intentions. You're at the first meeting of a new network or organization. Before long, someone says, “I know what we need – a vision statement.” There's lots of head‐nodding around the table – it's a concrete task after the initial meandering conversation. “Finally,” each person says to themselves, “we've got some direction.” Everyone eagerly dives in.

But after a while – sometimes not until several meetings have passed – the group finds itself still trying to find language that everyone accepts. They move from specific descriptive words to more general concepts. Before they know it, they've got a vision statement like the one above. And far too often, they don't really know what to do after they've “ratified” the vision.

With this skill, we're suggesting that you go about things very differently. There might be a time and place to create a vision statement for a brand‐new organization, but in any other setting, don't kid yourselves: a vision statement is not going to help you get anything done. If you have a basic direction, that's good enough to move forward. Agile leaders know how to translate ideas into meaningful, measurable outcomes that, when pursued, will help organizations achieve their most cherished ideals.

GREAT IDEAS LIE BELOW THE SURFACE

If a vision statement won't get things moving, what should you do instead? Rather than watching the discussion get more and more general, agile leaders drive the conversation deeper. They don't go for vague feel‐good adjectives and nouns. They help groups have the kinds of deep conversations that will allow them to explore what they are really hoping for and dreaming about in coming together.

Imagine you're designing a house with your partner. You're meeting with the architect, who asks you what you want the kitchen to look like. “I'd like it to look industrial,” you say, “all professional‐grade stainless steel appliances, black granite, that kind of thing.” Your partner looks at you in horror. “I thought we'd agreed this would be like that place we rented by the lake last year… you know, ‘glamping' (glamour + camping)! Lots of wood – cozy but luxurious!”

Fortunately, your architect has been through a lot of these kinds of projects. She's not going to let you head to divorce court over this kind of thing. She asks you a question you weren't expecting: “Tell me about the kinds of experiences you see happening in the kitchen if it's a fabulous room.” You're both quiet for a moment, then your partner says, “There's really good food being cooked.” “And good wine,” you add. Then the ideas come quickly: there's music – maybe people will even start to dance. Loud laughter. People hang out there rather than going in the living room. It's easy for your friends who are parents to bring their kids to parties with them. You can clean up in only a few minutes. In fact, it's hard for you to stop talking about your wonderful new kitchen.

“Okay,” the architect says. “Why don't you come back next week?” At your next meeting, she pulls out her laptop and has one of those programs that lets you walk around a virtual room. She has a kitchen on the screen, and she's put people in as well, who are obviously enjoying themselves. She uses the 360‐degree feature to let you look all around the room. “Yes!” you both say. “That's what I was trying to describe last week.”

The architect knows better than to point out what we, the invisible observers, have noticed: the kitchen doesn't look at all like what you described – no black granite countertops. And it doesn't look much like what your partner described, either – it's too big to ever be described as “cozy” and there's no rough‐hewn wood in sight.

What just happened? Did you compromise? No. A compromise would have been rustic cabinets with lots of black granite, or industrial‐grade appliances crammed into a small space. You both would have hated it. Did your architect deliver a “vision statement” kitchen – an empty room with just outlines so you'd know that it would, in fact, have cabinets and counters and appliances? That approach would only have postponed the argument to a later date.

What the architect did was to work from what you imagined a “successful” kitchen would be. She knew that in truth you weren't most concerned about the color of the counters, and the exact size wasn't the do‐or‐die item for your partner. What transcended all of those things is what you want to feel when you're in that room… you arrived at an agreement talking about very specific things that would happen there.

THREE QUESTIONS TO ASK

When we're helping groups adopt an agile strategy approach, we ask them to consider three questions:

1. If we are successful, what will we see?
2. What will we feel?
3. Whose lives will be different and how?

These questions are very qualitative by design. They ask you to imagine what something would be like and to describe it so that others can imagine it as well – the more specific, the better. This may feel uncomfortable, particularly if you're technically oriented and most attuned to data and charts and graphs. Try to suspend your discomfort and engage the more visual and creative parts of your brains. We often tell people to close their eyes for a few minutes of silence when they get to this point. Then we ask them to verbalize what they're imagining.

What is this “touchy‐feely” stuff about? There's a technical word for what you're doing: prospection. The best way to describe prospection is that it is reminiscing… forward. When you reminisce, you're not just remembering facts about something in the past; for example, “My grandmother was born in 1907, she lived in Minnesota.” There is an emotional element to reminiscing: “I remember going to my grandmother's house and baking cookies with her.” Physiologically, when you reminisce your brain is releasing dopamine into your bloodstream – the same chemical that's behind the jolt of pleasure people get from addictive drugs like amphetamines. Likewise, prospection, in which you imagine a successful future (rather than the past), provides that same release of dopamine. You become emotionally invested in success. And emotion – not vague vision statements – is what drives people to action.

When you put this skill into action, a couple of things will happen. First, the idea itself will begin to change. You'll go from the fuzzy image on a black and white TV (remember those?) to high‐definition. To illustrate what we mean, imagine a group working on school improvement. They've decided that their goal is to improve the learning experience for middle school students. Everyone can probably give general agreement to that idea. But it's still pretty fuzzy: Are they talking about rewriting curriculum? Changing the physical space in the classrooms? Upgrading the teachers' skills? Every person in the room could think that this is a quite specific goal and yet have a completely different set of assumptions about its meaning.

When they ask themselves the questions we suggest earlier, here's their revised draft:

All our students will come running off their buses and into the school in the morning because they are so excited about the learning experience they know they'll have.

We will feel great pride in our school – we will have educational leaders from around the state coming to visit because we've been recognized as an excellent school.

Our students will be prepared to take the most challenging curriculum available in high school so they can follow their career aspirations.

Do you see the change? It might not be exactly what everyone had in mind originally, but when someone describes what they think success would be like in this way, others can feel that it's right. People say things like, “Yes, you've captured it – I was thinking about something a little different, but you've really put your finger on it.”

Embedded in the group's statements is a future they would each like to see: they want their students to be highly engaged in the learning process, and for that to result in high achievement. As members share their ideas, the idea may continue to become more concrete as new dimensions are uncovered. Imagine one member of the group speaks up:

I think we're missing something. Here's what I said for the “whose lives will be different?” question: We will have teachers from throughout the country clamoring to work at our school because they have the freedom to be excellent rather than having to “teach to the test.” Aren't we trying to get away from the constant testing?

This statement introduces a new element, and the conversation deepens to sort it out – are they talking about college preparation, or about standardized testing? In using this skill, the agile leader needs to keep driving down until they reach those deepest shared aspirations and dreams. The group might refine their first statement a bit to incorporate the new idea:

All our students come running off their buses and into the school in the morning because they are so excited about the learning experience that awaits them – it's based on exploring ideas, not preparing for a test.

One important thing that will happen when you apply this skill is that each person will emotionally engage with the outcome. If you had functional MRI scanners like the ones in brain research labs, you'd see the dopamine coursing through the members' bloodstreams! The group is no longer a task force they're on, it's something they are personally committed to. People start to physically lean in, to gesture. They are seeing the outcome “in their mind's eye.” For real transformation (in any area), you will need that engagement, that commitment. When you see this body language, you know you're on the right track.

MEASURING

We all see things from our own perspective. A tree might be described as gigantic by someone from the desert, while someone who grew up around redwoods might say it was on the short side. If the two meet and describe the tree to one another, you can bet that their descriptions will be very different indeed. If these two people are to have a productive conversation, they need a way to talk about the tree that doesn't rely on their own experiences. The only ways to accurately convey the size of the tree are to either measure it directly, or to compare it to something that both people have seen.

Many of us dislike metrics because they're so often used as statements of success or failure or as a means of control. This skill invites us to think about metrics in a different way: metrics are a way to develop a common language, so that we know we are talking about the same thing. If you can get to agreement about how you would measure a successful outcome, you can be fairly sure that you are aligned toward the same outcome. For example, the outcome statement about students being excited to get to school each morning might be measured by (among other things) tracking absenteeism.

The other reason that metrics are unpopular is that data can be arduous to gather with any precision. You might have to buy new equipment, train others to take measurements, learn the software to analyze the data, or get approval to launch a survey. It might even mean hiring new staff or an external evaluator, just to make sure it's done right and in compliance with laws or a funder's requirements. No wonder we inwardly groan when we hear the word!

You'll be relieved to learn that for our purposes, selecting the ways in which you might measure an outcome does not necessarily mean that you're pledging to actually carrying out the measuring. You might do so… or you might not. You are not writing an assessment or evaluation plan or committing to Key Performance Indicators. For now, you are only using this skill as a way to engage and align a group's members toward a shared outcome. You have the freedom to think expansively about what success would look like – if a longitudinal (and very expensive) series of focus groups with users would be the best way to measure whether a project, product or service has achieved the original aims, choose that as a way to measure. Or, maybe you select something simple and intuitive. The point we underscore is this: to get alignment within a group, you need to define a shared outcome that everyone can see in their mind's eye. You need to drive your conversation deeper with enough specificity that you can come up with metrics. When you start describing the future with metrics you have passed the threshold of vague language. You are now communicating with each other with enough clarity that people can “see” what the others are thinking. You are achieving alignment toward an outcome. This use of metrics stands apart from formal assessment. Of course, assessment is important, and you may decide that the measures you identify form the building blocks of an evaluation plan – but that should be a separate decision.

To go back to the school example, the participants might agree that absenteeism would be one good way to measure that “running off the bus” kind of student engagement. Now, they can be fairly confident that they have converged on what engagement means. Let's look at what can happen if a group decides to skip the conversation about what success would mean and possible accompanying metrics. When you stick to general vision statements (even if you don't think they're that general), you may find yourself a few weeks or months later facing angry disagreements: “What?! I thought we were doing ‘this,' not ‘that'!” One person might think student engagement means that students will be completing their homework assignments. Another person might think that student engagement means the amount of time students spend on extracurricular activities. The point is this: the term “engagement” is too vague for us to ensure alignment. We need to go deeper and describe the future we want to create. We need to describe what people will be seeing, feeling, and doing.

Less obviously, without a deeper conversation people may decide they don't really have time for “yet another committee.” They will vote with their feet and exit the scene. They don't disagree with the vision statement, but it never captured their imagination, either. Often, not much has happened beyond the vision statement – the group still isn't sure what it should do. For the pragmatists in the group, other more pressing demands have led them to decide that they just can't get involved with this initiative. You've wasted time and, more importantly, the participants' trust of one another.

In some ways this skill is the most counterintuitive of the ten in this book. It's easy to think that any quick agreement on fairly general goals – even a vaguely worded vision statement – is a positive thing. As we began to write this chapter, Ed shared a story from his work in China. During the 1990s he negotiated a number of joint venture agreements for his clients. His Chinese colleague, a former intelligence officer for the Chinese government, had a great deal of experience watching how US managers negotiated with their Chinese partners. He suggested that US managers are often too quick to jump to a signing a contract without having a deeper understanding of shared outcomes: precisely how mutual benefits will be generated. Ed's Chinese colleague even had an expression that captured what happens when partners do not fully understand where they want to go together. Problems will inevitably arise because the partners end up “sleeping in the same bed but dreaming different dreams.”

So, while it's tempting to move forward on a somewhat vague, our experience is the same as Ed's Chinese colleague, and not just where international joint ventures are concerned. Vagueness tends to doom the work from the start. The words do not emotionally engage people, and without emotion, people do not move. You may fear that deeper conversation will trigger dissension and arguments. But agile leaders know that just the opposite happens. We can overcome apathy with clarity and specificity, and we prevent future dissension by having a more sophisticated conversation now. Agile leaders who take this step reap great benefits as the group continues its work together, more committed than ever to making sure their efforts succeed.

PUTTING THE SKILL TO WORK: THE AGILE LEADER AS DREAMCATCHER

In using this skill, the agile leader is helping the group articulate its dreams and then make them tangible enough to pursue. As you might have guessed, the place to start is to ask the three questions: What would we see? What would we feel? Whose life would be different and how? Leave time for a substantive and somewhat meandering conversation – although it probably won't take as long as some conversations about vision statements!

Try for at least three statements about the outcome – not necessarily one answer to each of the questions (sometimes one or more of the questions just doesn't connect for a particular concept), but three or four statements in all. It's tempting to just take a vote on the most popular statements and move on. Resist that temptation, and let it take as much time as is needed, within reason, to find the ones that really resonate – in our experience, between 20 and 40 minutes is about right.

Once you have statements about what a successful outcome would look like, go back to each one and name a couple of ways you could measure that quality. Remember, you're not (yet) committing to doing the measurement – at this stage, you're just trying to make sure that you each understand the outcome in the same way. For now, you have the freedom to propose a costly longitudinal study or an expensive tracking system (of course, before you actually launch a project, you'll want to return to the conversation about how to monitor progress and assess outcomes).

It is only when we are sure of what we want – in detail – that we can really pursue it. This skill allows agile leaders to guide groups in the kind of dialogue that is needed in order to come to a shared commitment to a common destination. With a clear picture of success and how it could be measured, the group is ready to consider the actions that will produce that success.