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Chapter Fifteen

ACTION 8
Creating Visions
That Compel

People who Glow are able to create a compelling vision that sparks energy and is so exciting and engaging that others are drawn to it.

A vision invites people into the future. It can describe what is important to you and can ignite the latent energy around you. Look back at your igniting latent energy profile in Figure 13.1 to help you to understand where you are now in terms of creating a compelling vision. Recall Ratan Tata’s vision: “Imagine a world where rural communities can access the transport infrastructure so crucial for their development.” It was a vision of the future so engaging and exhilarating that people were drawn to it in large numbers. Great visions like Tata’s are palpable: they actually allow others to think their way into them.

Following are some of the ways I heard people talking about an igniting vision that helped them Glow:

The first person speaks of her own vision; the other two talk of being inspired by a visionary leader. The secret to creating a Hot Spot in which to Glow is to find a visionary person capable of igniting latent energy—and that person might well be you, expressing your own visions and ideas about the future.

You can find visionaries who ignite the latent energy around you. Think of how Al Gore ignited thinking around the world on climate change. Or how Nelson Mandela ignited thinking around equality and peaceful coexistence. These great charismatic sources of ignition are wonderful to experience, but because they are distant, they are unlikely to be sources of Glow in your own life. To Glow, you need to tap into your own personal source of igniting vision. In this chapter we examine what it will take for you to access your courage, convictions, and values to bring your own nascent vision to the fore and communicate it in a compelling way.

Mohi and a Vision That Compels

Mohi is a colleague whom I work with occasionally. He works for a large company and sees his mission as helping the company innovate. Mohi is a great source of visionary inspiration. Every time I meet him, I walk away inspired, with exciting possibilities in mind. Recently, I have helped him on a couple of projects because his vision made me eager to volunteer: the Hot Spot he has created I find almost irresistible. Mohi Glows brightly. His projects are always populated by fascinating people. In Mohi’s projects I am likely to meet film makers, musicians, professors of knowledge management, Japanese businessmen—there are no boundaries.

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Whenever we are together, Mohi tells me about his visions. The table becomes covered with his ideas—diagrams of his plans, CDs of musicians he is working with, reports he is writing. Mohi is great at sharing his excitement and suggesting ways in which he thinks I might join in. How does Mohi do this? I see four characteristics that are crucial to the formulation of Mohi’s vision:

• He is not afraid to ask the “what if ” questions that get him thinking.
• He is prepared to spend time daydreaming.
• He is tightly connected to his own values and beliefs as sources of energy.
• He uses stories to weave dreams.

Asking the “What If ” Questions

Visions are about the future—and a good way to begin to frame your thinking about the future is to go back to the ideas about questions but this time to phrase them as “what if ” questions. Since “what if ” questions are about events that have never taken place, you have to move beyond your conscious mind to access your ideas about possible futures. It is sometimes in your daydreams that you begin to rehearse possible futures and create a vision of what could ignite your energy. You ask and answer “what if ” questions every time you dream.

“What if ” questions are about the future, not the past. By changing the focus of your vision, they serve to weaken the links to the past and strengthen the links to the future. Thinking about the future is a much less analytical and rigorous task than thinking about the past. So rather than accessing your rational and analytical mind, as you do when you are asking questions and engaging in disciplined debate, you are engaging your imagination and accessing your dreams.

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Working with Mohi, I see that these “what if ” questions can be vital. For example, he has asked, “What if companies could join up to create an institute for cooperation?”

We can all ask “what if ” questions. The challenge to overcome is that we have been trained to look only to the past and ask “what was” questions. So as adept as we may be at looking at what went before, at analyzing figures, spotting trends, figuring out what happened, future-oriented questions can be trickier.

Actions to take now to ask “what if” questions

Action 8.1 Asking “what if ” questions. Find a place where you can concentrate (your “third place”), and set aside a few hours (block these “golden moments” with your gold-ink pen) to let your imagination wander, writing down “what if ” questions as they occur to you. When you are satisfied with your mental wandering, look at your questions, and decide if there are any that really ignite your imagination. Try those out on friends and see how others feel about them: do any ignite people’s imagination?

Here are some questions that have settled into my mind over the past couple of years:

My guess is that as you look at these questions some will ignite you while others will leave you cold. You have to build your own list—here are some more questions friends have come up with:

Giving Time to Daydreaming

Great ideas and visions are part unconscious insight, part external inspiration. It is the back-and-forth between insight and inspiration that serves as a basis for refining your ideas and using stories to weave dreams. Sometimes the greatest source of insight will come from something you have heard, an idea you have seen, or an emotion you have felt. The information treasures we thought about in Action 7 (Chapter Fourteen) can be important fuel for your vision. Sometimes the greatest treasure comes in small bits of information that are unusual and worthy of attention. It is these bits of unusual information that taken together can build on your unconscious ideas or provide other avenues for action. For example, when I was in Mumbai in 2008, I made it my habit to read the daily newspapers. What caught my notice was an item about the Nano car. It was this information treasure that led me to the whole Nano story. Catching these small nuggets of unusual and worthy information can be important steps in helping you elaborate your dreams.

Learning to daydream was an important way that Mohi learnt to Glow. He kept his energy alight by spinning the dreams that became his vision for how his work could develop. He did this by connecting with his memories—not of the past but his “memories of the future.” These are the stories he could tell himself about what the future could be and how he could create a place of high energy and innovation.

Mohi wanted to access more of his creative side. He knew that creating a vision of how the company could innovate would need his personal creativity. He had heard that poets often sleep with a pencil and paper by the bed to make notes as soon as they wake up. He resolved to do the same, and every now and again, he was surprised in the morning by a creative insight he had had during the night.

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Thinking about how I daydream, I realized long ago that I am a morning person. By the afternoon, my mind is usually so distracted by the minutiae of my life that my chances of being reflective are very low. So I tend to put aside a couple of morning hours every week. These are my “golden moments,” blocked out in my calendar in gold ink. When I glance at my schedule, I can see the golden notations, and somehow the majesty of the color decreases my temptation to fill that reflection time with the spillover of everyday life.

Actions to take now to help you daydream

Action 8.2 Daydreaming. Acknowledge that daydreaming can help you imagine and describe the future. You can elaborate your “memory of the future” by making it as tangible as possible. Ask yourself these three questions:

• What would people see?
• How would they feel about it?
• What would it mean to me?

Next, think about the periods in your life when you have felt particularly creative and able to access your innermost thoughts. Could you re-create these periods on a more frequent basis? Would the pencil-and-paper-by-the-bed habit work for you?

Connecting to Your Values and Beliefs

When you Glow, you capture the imagination of others with your ideas, your visions, or your stories. People are drawn to those that resonate with themselves. They want to hear the “real you” rather than a made-up, fabricated you.

Authenticity is natural; you don’t have to work at it. But what you do have to do is have sufficient self-knowledge that you don’t stray into attitudes or behaviors that are not the authentic you. If your vision does not reflect your own values and beliefs, you will jettison it at the first sign of difficulty. And if your vision does not reflect your values, others will also abandon it at the first sign of trouble. To create resonant questions and visions, you have to connect them with your values and beliefs, and this means that you need to make that connection clear and actively build your self-awareness.

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Actions to take now to connect to your values and beliefs

Action 8.3 Connecting to your heart. To connect more fully to your values and beliefs, you need to hear what your heart has to say—and also what your friends have to say:

• First, ask yourself what words your closest friends and associates would use to describe your values.
• Then ask, “When I reflect on the decisions I have made in the past, what underlying values and beliefs have steered these decisions?”
• Use both questions to draw up a list of the values and beliefs that are important in your life.
• When you begin to daydream around a vision or to ask an igniting question, go back to these values and beliefs and ask yourself, “Does what I am thinking about embody what it important and valuable to me?”

Take a look at Action 9.4 in Chapter Sixteen for a list of values that people often hold about their work.

When Mohi reflected on these questions, he realized that one of his core values was the creativity of synthesis. He knew that any vision he created would have to resonate with his own creative spirit. When I ask myself these questions, I know that to remain authentic to myself, I need to create questions and visions that reflect with my own values and beliefs around building communities, focusing on innovation, being autonomous, and creating a balanced life. So when I built a vision about how the ideas around Hot Spots would evolve, the vision was of a community of people engaged in state-of-the-art work, many of whom worked part-time and lived in the place they most loved. That meant, of course, that there were other visions I rejected as being inauthentic to my beliefs and values. So, for example, my vision was not of building a consulting practice, because a balanced life is an important value to me, and I knew that managing many people would destroy this and the autonomy I prize. Connecting to your values and beliefs is about making choices—and sometimes the most crucial choices are about what to reject.

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Using Stories to Weave Dreams

People like Mohi and Johanna, who have created a future vision that others find compelling, often use stories to ignite and inspire others. These stories can take many forms—they could be about how the idea will be developed, how it will look when it is completed, or what it will feel like to others as they become involved. The more engaging, inspiring, and interesting the story, the more likely others will be drawn to it and prepared to engage their energy. When you build a story about the future, you allow and encourage others to engage in your narrative. People begin to see themselves in your story of the future and weave their own dreams as you weave yours.

Weaving stories was one of the ways that both Mohi and Johanna connected with others. For Johanna, this meant creating her vision of the future by taking an idea that was important to her and part of her personal store of dreams and visions. The dream she had was of an informal work setting where people could f low in and out. She thought of the open-air markets she had seen in California where people brought their produce to trade and sell. She used this initial idea to spin a story by imagining how this market would work if instead of food and wine, people brought their skills and crafts. So she imagined a Web designer laying out a stall with some of his designs. Prospective clients would wander around “sampling” the product before they engaged the Web designer.

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When Johanna described this dream and story to others, they could understand it. They to could picture the market scene and the stalls. They could imagine themselves in the market for skills, and they could imagine how they felt and what contribution they could make.

Mohi also found a way of describing his vision through a story. The story and image he told was of the Japanese tea ceremony. For him, this ceremony captures many of his impressions of innovation. To tell the story to others, he collaborated with one of Japan’s most revered film makers to produce a short film about the tea ceremony. I was in the audience when the film was first shown and found it immeasurably moving. It begins with the tea master delicately trimming the leaves of the trees around the ceremonial place to achieve the perfect dappling effect of light and dark. Then the teapots are taken out and carefully arranged, the water is boiled on a simple fire, and the tea for the occasion is selected. From a story lasting less than five minutes, the audience began to understand what Mohi and his colleagues believed in.

This story of the tea ceremony resonated with the values of quality, simplicity, and tradition. The story resonates with Mohi because it encapsulates the values that drive him—the values of innovation through simplicity and acknowledging the traditions of the past. By developing this story, Mohi had created a way of talking with others about what they could do to create innovation and ultimately to Glow.

Actions to take now to create a resonating story

Action 8.4 Creating resonating stories. In your questions and visions, you have begun to think about a theme for the future that could be important and resonant with you. Now imagine that theme as a story. It could be a realistic story about how your vision will develop, in the way that Johanna used the story about the California market to describe her ideas, or it could be an analogy that alludes to an aspect of your vision, in the way that Mohi used the tea ceremony as an analogy of the simplicity he thought would be crucial to innovation.

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Now write the outline of the story or analogy that illustrates what you are excited about—no more than one page. Test the story out with friends, Does it resonate with them? Does it capture what is important? Would they want to be part of it?

An Exercise in Crafting an Igniting Vision

The challenge here is to think about your vision for the future and begin to tell it as a compelling and resonant story. How will the events emerge? Who will be involved? What will they experience, and what will be their perceptions and emotions? How will you and others feel? These stories will come from your dreams and have resonance through their connections to your deeply held values and beliefs.

So let’s make a story out of one of the visions you have accessed. I’ve always enjoyed children’s stories in which you can insert your own names for the characters. I have used this same idea to write a little story into which you can drop your own characters, your own product, and your own vision. Play around with it, and use it as a basis for creating a more authentic and vibrant story of your own.

That probably sounds more like a fairy tale than a realistic story. But it captures the elements of a story about the future. Reading the story, how did you feel? I wrote a story a little like this for my own team when I was launching the Hot Spots Movement because for me it is positive, it tells people something about the emotions they feel, and it conveys the values involved in the creation of the product, service, or idea. And as I write this piece, we have just had our first magical summer party where we sat with well-wishers beneath a beautiful canopy of branches and enjoyed the night air.

Key Points in Chapter Fifteen
ACTION 8
Creating Visions That Compel

When you create a vision, you are creating an invitation to the future. This can have a profound impact on drawing others to you and can ignite latent energy and help everyone Glow. People who create visions are not afraid to ask “what if ” questions.

Asking “What If” Questions
Invite people into the future.

Action 8.1 Asking “what if ” questions

Giving Time to Daydreaming
This can be an important source of compelling visions.

Action 8.2 Daydreaming

Connecting to Your Values and Beliefs
People are drawn to your ideas and vision for the future because they can see in these your true authentic self.

Action 8.3 Connecting to your heart

Using Stories to Weave Dreams
The more engaging and inspiring a story, the more people can see themselves in the story and feel compelled by it.

Action 8.4 Creating resonating stories