CHAPTER 8

Vision Stories

When I was a kid, my mother taught me table manners by suggesting I’d need them, “In case the queen ever invites you to tea.” I’m over fifty, and so far I’ve received no royal invitations, but I do have lovely table manners.

The queen’s tea party was my mother’s version of a Vision story. When I was eight, using a short fork for salad seemed ridiculous without my mother’s “You’ll thank me someday” story about my future self barely avoiding public humiliation at a royal tea party. We can always use a good Vision story to help develop moral character and delayed gratification, no matter how old we are.

Unpleasant chores, training, routine maintenance, and disruptive changes in procedure rarely offer much immediate gratification. Frustration experienced in the here and now is like an advance payment against some payoff we hope to reap in the future. A good Vision story makes your promise for future payoffs tangible enough to feel realistic. When you make a vision come alive with carefully crafted images, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings, you eclipse the burden of today with tomorrow’s reward. Overwhelming obstacles shrink to bearable frustrations that are achievable and worth the effort.

A Vision story raises your gaze from current difficulties, complexity, and ambiguity to see a future worth the effort of resisting daily temptations to change direction, give up, compromise, or seek distractions. Without a visceral and easily remembered vision, it is easy to forget who we are and why we are here.

A Vision story builds a sensory, imagined future, just like a bright, shiny bicycle in a store window that motivates a child to do more chores. Stimulating imagined experiences of that future bicycle fuels energy to rummage through trash for aluminum cans, to babysit little monsters, or even to wash the family car. After we see, taste, touch, smell, and hear a realistic and emotionally compelling future in our imagination, work seems less menial and difficult in relation to the payoff.

Storytelling brings substance to any vision process. When you apply the discipline of interpreting your vision with a story, the process often exposes “plot holes” that may send you back to the drawing board. Building a Vision story is a good way to run thought experiments that can anticipate contrary perceptions or unintended outcomes. Vision stories demand a lot, but they deliver a lot too.

Scenario planning is an underused application of storytelling. Royal Dutch Shell’s Scenario Planning team set aside elaborate computer models to predict the future and put the term “scenario planning” on the map after building strategies based on contingency plans that anticipated global events. They had scenarios that predicted the 1973 oil embargo and the fall of the Soviet Union along with a vision for each eventuality.

In scenario planning, strategies are tested in thought experiments against a variety of realistic future stories. This is popularly called a “wind tunnel test” invoking the metaphor of testing aircraft against various weather conditions simulated in a wind tunnel. As with all storytelling, making it tangible produces insights on the plausibility of your vision.

In South Africa during the early 1990s, an incomplete set of government, citizen, and corporate stakeholders engaged in scenario planning at the Mont Fleur Conference Center to craft a common vision for a safe and successful postapartheid South Africa. The country seemed to be leading straight to civil war. Attendees left the event and proceeded to make a series of informal presentations beginning in 1992 that profiled four possible “Mont Fleur scenarios”: the “ostrich” (denial and civil war), “lame duck” (weak agreements), “Icarus” (failed pursuit of socialism), or the inspiring “flight of the flamingos” (inclusive democracy and sustainable agreements). Conversations naturally flourished when discussing the “flamingo” option in a way that made the vision of a peaceful transition increasingly plausible, even likely, to a critical mass of citizens.

No scenario could anticipate a man such as Nelson Mandela, but the “flamingo” Vision story surely prepared fertile ground for Dr. Mandela to advise his followers, “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.” Vision stories build a new future first in people’s imaginations, because if you can’t see it, you can’t build it.

Walking around in the virtual reality of a story, you intuitively identify otherwise unpredictable implications, consequences, and correlating factors that are invisible to discussions that stay on a conceptual level. Our purpose here is to build a future story that pulls us in. A “pull” story conjures positive emotions such as desire, hope, belonging, or happiness. Stories based on negative emotions such as fear (greed is just another word for fear) fuel stress (also a word for fear) and feed perceptions of danger, scarcity, and us/them thinking. Fear is a physiological and psychological state that narrows vision and limits creativity. The molecules of fear sacrifice peripheral vision in favor of focusing on problems and our three basic human responses: fight, flight, or freeze. Fear can make you stupid. It compartmentalizes every IQ point you have into closed loops of worst-case scenarios.

Hope and love, on the other hand, expand peripheral vision so you can see connections and investigate possibilities only obvious to a relaxed eye. A good Vision story builds resilience and optimism, and at the same time, it validates the difficulties of achieving your vision. “Pie in the sky” visions that ignore real pain, sacrifice, and frustration can burn out your optimists and fail to motivate the realists in your group. You don’t want to lose those people or overpromise. That’s just borrowing trouble.

Exercise: Develop Your Vision

Before we embark on finding a story, you need to do some groundwork. Begin with your personal vision first. What is your vision? Start by imagining a time 5 to 10 years from now when you have just achieved a set of tangible goals (experiment with a few or conduct a vision trip for each goal one at a time). Let your imagination observe a typical day in tangible detail. You may have to wait, but your imagination will do its job if you are patient. We humans have a huge prefrontal cortex designed specifically for scenario planning in story form. We may as well use it. As the story evolves, your brain will extrapolate from every experience you’ve ever had to identify plausible opportunities and obstacles as well as fake but useful memories of how you achieved your goals. What was at stake? Who was involved? What happened?

You can illustrate your Vision story like a comic strip or find an analogy that is similar to the achievements, obstacles, and events you imagined. You will find ideas from all four buckets of stories. Ideally, you will find one that blends the why and how into one. This is a rare gem: a story that not only motivates but also suggests strategies to get there. Read through these four examples of Vision stories to get your ideas flowing, and jot them down as you go along. Give your imagination free rein to explore, anticipate, regroup, and reroute until you have a plausible scenario that feels like success. If it doesn’t feel right to you, it won’t feel right to anyone else.

A Time You Shined

During the fall of 1992, I was working at J. Walter Thompson in Melbourne, Australia. I had just completed a successful pilot program for the Ford dealer network, set to expand in the next year from a budget of $200,000 to $2 million. The “powers that be” decided to bring in someone with more experience to run “my” program. I didn’t take it well. I decided I wasn’t cut out for advertising.

Earlier that year in some personal development workshop, I was asked, “If you had all the money in the world, what would you do?” I knew immediately: “I would do something to help groups agree on who they are and why they are here.” But my “vision” was so vague that I muddled along without making any real changes. I couldn’t envision that future, much less a plan to get there. My subconscious decided to give me a metaphor I could work with.

One night I had a dream that changed everything. I dreamed I was in a big train station with more than 20 platforms. I sat with my mother, drinking coffee, surrounded by our luggage and waiting for our train, which was due in an hour or so. I stood up and announced I was going to walk around a bit. I decided to find our platform and check it out. It was a long walk and down an escalator. As I stood on the platform, our train arrived, an hour early, and the loudspeaker said it was leaving in three minutes. I didn’t have my luggage. I didn’t have a ticket. My mother didn’t know where I was, but I got on anyway.

If I took the time to get everything I needed, I would miss the train. I distinctly remember thinking, “I’ll just have to make it up as I go,” and I began practicing my explanation for the first problem I’d encounter: no ticket to show the guy who checks tickets.

When I woke up that next morning, I knew I would quit my job, move back to the United States, find a graduate program or a mentor, and invent a new career. Some people thought I was having a meltdown, my mother in particular. Common sense says you need to have a job before you quit one, at the very least a general idea of a job description. I had neither. On April 23, 1993, I flew home to Louisiana, drove across country that June, and by August I had found both a graduate program and a mentor. By 1997, I had a graduate degree, two years’ experience with my mentor, and a contract for my first book. When the book came out, I started my own business. My Vision story told me to just get on the train without a ticket or luggage and figure out the details as they arose.

A Vision story carved in stone is not as good as one that is loose enough to adapt and change along the way.

A Time You Blew It

One of my first bosses had to see every letter I wrote and critiqued my presentation before I was allowed to send a letter or deliver the presentation to our client. Letters came back from her dense with red pen marks, deleted sentences, and scribbled rewrites. Presentations were rearranged and reworded to Linda’s satisfaction. I didn’t fight her. I had lost all my confidence the year before in a rather brutal public-speaking course, where the instructor stopped us in the middle of an extemporaneous speech for other participants to vote you on or off the stage. I was devastated. Survivor may make good TV, but it’s not a nurturing format for developing good communication skills.

These highly edited presentations were boring, awkward, and painful for me and everyone else. I am not a very good marionette. One day, I was asked to present a status report in Linda’s absence. She was off getting her boobs done. I had no taskmaster to please, so I just did it my way. I delivered a 15-minute presentation that for once wasn’t designed to avoid her red pen but was instead designed to please the client. And boy, did it please the client. I was embarrassed by praise that seemed to ask, “What was your problem before?” The client congratulated my boss’s boss because the only explanation that made sense to them was that my newly coherent and smooth delivery must have been a result of his mentoring. He just smiled and gave me a wink.

From that day forward, I vowed to never deliver someone else’s words or someone else’s message. I decided I would be myself, speak in my style with my own words, and pay the price if I blew it. I knew that if I couldn’t make the message mine, then I should rethink the message.

A Mentor

If you have ever gotten into trouble for telling the truth, then we have something in common. I’ve been blabbing uncomfortable truths or naming elephants that might have sat happily unnamed ever since I was five years old. Rather than an extra dose of courage, I suspect my behavior is better described as a certain lack of discretion. But since that’s who I am, I need skills to handle what happens next. I embraced the archetype of heretic and looked for a successful heretic story that would teach me how to tell the truth and not get burned at the stake. I found a mentor in the man Galileo. He is one of my favorite truth tellers for lots of reasons, but most of all because he stuck by his truth without burning at the stake. One of his contemporaries, Bruno, said the exact same things Galileo said, and he was burned at the stake. Galileo’s final punishment was house arrest at an age when traveling was difficult anyway.

People can tell me all day long that I “have to pick my battles,” but I can’t seem to translate that advice into a tangible strategy. Galileo’s story is much more helpful. He had powerful friends and a diplomatic relationship with “the truth.” To survive the Inquisition, Galileo actually signed a confession admitting that he was wrong and asserting that the sun orbited the earth. After that, he continued to write and speak, and he stayed under the radar until finally confined to his own house in Florence in his seventies.

I regularly ask myself, “W.W.G.D.?” What would Galileo do? His biography is a Vision story to me. Legend has it that Galileo received a letter from a friend begging him to intervene and save Bruno from burning, but he declined. Maybe he stayed silent because he didn’t have enough clout or maybe he chose to save himself instead. It reminds me of the serenity prayer phrase, “the wisdom to know the difference.” Galileo had a passion for the truth, but he did not choose to become a martyr. When the pope forced Galileo to sign that confession, Galileo folded like a cheap tent.

But Galileo’s best strategy was to write a story in which three characters argue the virtues and validity of both sides of the argument. He published his story in a book titled The Dialogue of Two World Systems just four years before he died. It is still in print. Galileo let his characters say what he could not and ask questions that exposed the truth he was forbidden from discussing. Galileo was a crafty old coot. He was dedicated to the truth, flexible enough to moderate his approach, and willing to silence his ego when danger threatened—lessons I try to remember.

Every human drama is to some extent a repeat of one that went before. If you look closely, you will find an individual you admire who has already overcome obstacles and pursued goals remarkably similar to your own.

A Book, Movie, or Current Event

There are plenty of movies that offer great Vision stories. Miracle (2004), about the 1980 US ice-hockey team, teaches about cohesion. Seabiscuit (2003) represents the galvanizing spirit of the underdog. The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) straightens my spine as it reminds me that I decide who I am and where I belong. But all these movies are about competition and sports, where there are winners and losers.

I enjoy contests, but my overarching vision for my life is not a competition. More than a decade ago, I decided to live my life as an artist. I think businesses and organizations need art as much as any other part of society. I’m also from the South. So it might be no surprise that I turn to Johnny Cash.

Johnny Cash was a prolific artist. During his recording career starting in 1955, he is said to have written well over 1,000 songs. He released more than 153 singles and 96 albums. After 1968, when Johnny married June Carter and got his addictions under control, it seems that most fights with his “handlers” were over issues of authenticity. He wrote in his autobiography, Cash, that he got tired of his record company, CBS, advising him with demographics of the “new country fan,” the “new market profile,” and all the other trends derived with statistics.⁴ By 1974, he felt “mentally divorced” from CBS. So Cash gave CBS a record called “Chicken in Black,” which was “intentionally atrocious.” He even forced CBS to pay for a video shot in New York City where he dressed up like a chicken. The next year, 1986, CBS declined to renew his contract. Big surprise. Johnny Cash had discovered civil disobedience.

I love this story because it supports my natural inclination to reject numbers that don’t create a meaningful connection I can feel in my bones. If it doesn’t feel right, I don’t do it. Johnny Cash’s long career proves that standing his ground paid off. At age 61, he had a comeback that reached deep into the very demographics CBS would’ve killed for. Producer Rick Rubin, “in clothes that would’ve done a wino proud,” convinced Cash that he would produce whatever music Cash wanted to record. Rubin, producer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Beastie Boys, told him he wasn’t very familiar with the music Cash loved, but he wanted to hear all of it. Cash questioned Rubin’s assumption that his music could appeal to a younger audience. He thought it unlikely. Rubin answered that “they only need to see the fire and passion you bring to your music … just be totally honest.” That honesty produced four Grammy-winning albums.

Authenticity, the good and the bad, is synonymous with the Cash legend. Johnny Cash’s life is a testament to never giving up on your art and to never selling out. When I wear my Johnny Cash t-shirt, strangers give me the thumbs-up sign in the grocery store. It’s validating.

One final note: In my humble opinion, fiction is a dangerous place to go hunting for Vision stories because even great fiction is an invented world that may have been idealized and was certainly manipulated to grab and keep attention. The benefit of true stories is that they actually happened (at least once), so it seems more likely that you could make them happen again.

4. Johnny Cash, Cash: The Autobiography (New York: HarperOne, 2003).