I have had the opportunity (the pleasure, actually) to be client-side as Blue Cottage led a two-day intensive visioning exercise back in the Summer for 2010. This was no small feat: The task the Blue Cottage team had before them was to engage more than one hundred community stakeholders, organizational management and thought leaders in a compressed timeframe and to guide a group through an analysis of the stakeholder feedback to develop a project vision. The outcome from the exercise was a project vision statement that was thoughtful, salient and helped the organization accurately define its preferred future. Even those who were skeptical of the value of the visioning work left the main workshop feeling excited about the vision for the project.
The experience of that two-day session is why I’ve chosen to work with Blue Cottage today. I was so inspired by the effectiveness of the team, and it is clear that they are a great team that does great work. So, when I learned they were hiring, I reached out right away.
It has come to pass that I’ve started here as a healthcare consultant at an exciting time of change and evolution for the company – right at the beginning of a “growth spurt.” And to kick-off that change and figure out what we hope to grow into, the company undertook a visioning exercise of its own in mid-February, guided by Stas’ Kazmierski of ZingTrain and Ari Weinzweig of the Zingerman Group of Companies.
In an earlier posting, Juliet acknowledged that Visioning can be challenging work. Any shift that demands that we mentally check our day-to-day occupations at the door and project a future that we might not have even contemplated yet as a group is a stretch task, to say the least. So why go through with it? Can’t organizations function without a clear vision?
Absolutely – and lots do, some with success, and others with disaster.
Visioning work not only helps organizations to articulate a preferred future for a project or organization, this work also helps to get supporters (internal and external) engaged to reaching your future state. At our visioning session, Ari made the point that it’s fine if the vision is in your head, but it’s a lot easier for other people to work towards it if it’s down on paper. What’s more, whether you’ve got a two or 20,000 member team, they need to understand the vision so they can work towards it. So, there’s tremendous value in getting something down on paper that everyone can follow along with.
If you can’t get to your vision realized without your team, getting their input is a critical step of the process. Those organizations that take an open and consultative approach have much more success in getting their vision done more quickly because they bring all stakeholders to the table at the first instance – and that can even mean bringing folks in that you know will be opposed to your ideas. Engaging as many people as appropriate, even at the risk of hearing differing or conflicting points of view, is a healthy for creation process. Different viewpoints can help to create a more robust vision through challenging our assumptions and taking into consideration different experiences. It can also help to identify areas that are sensitive to some individuals or groups and allows for a process to manage issues early on in your transformation, giving you an opportunity to avoid opposition down the road when there’s no turning back.
I find visioning work to be a lot of fun. It’s a chance for teams to get together to do a little team building through creativity and helps to shake out all those bright ideas and innovations around a process or a project that we’re just too busy to develop thoughts around while we’re spinning away with our days.
As for our new direction, it’s exciting times for the Blue Cottage. We’ve got team expansion and new services to bring on-line, plus we’re expanding in new markets – I’m the first Canadian employee based out of Toronto, and we’re bringing a west coast consultant on in the Spring.
The most important thing I gleaned from the Visioning work was that the Blue Cottage team operates at a very high standard. While we have our sites on expansion and evolution of Blue Cottage Consulting , our priority remains providing exceptional services and products to our clients so they can in turn provide exceptional care to their patients.