Thursday, January 4, 2007

Enhancing Leadership Capacity to Envision the Future

Here are some action items for leaders to envision a bright future for their organizations (Kouzes & Posner, 2002):

  • Think first about your past—by examining the history of the organization, including accomplishments and failures the leader can better understand strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and trends relative to visionary thinking.
  • Determine what you want—the leader’s organization needs to determine what needs to be accomplished in the next five years from now and beyond. This process will help identify some of the basic values that drive the leader’s philosophy of leadership. What do we want to do? What are we passionate about? What do we want to prove by building this organization? And so on and so forth.
  • Write an article about how you have made a difference—the article describing a future flashback of one’s accomplishments would be a very useful way of fleshing out what things the leader is most proud of and what things could potentially provide the greatest contribution to the surrounding community or the community’s growth. Showing the article to one’s colleagues and peers might be uncomfortable but also very instructive.
  • Write a short vision statement—the vision statement is a more comprehensive version of the time-honored process of writing a mission statement. In the vision statement, the leader would write about the ideal vision of his career and the business success of the organization. A related process is to write a short slogan that captures the essence of the vision. The short slogan is a great way of communicating the fundamental reason for the organization’s existence to all constituencies. The author has personally found that such slogans are especially useful for developing short sales pitches for field sales people to learn how to describe concisely the company.
  • Act on your intuition—if one has an idea that brings life to a vision, then a great way of testing the realism is to go try something that validates the vision. Try it. Model it. Prototype it. For example, if the vision is to build a company that is more closely in touch with customers, then a good way to test out that notion is to start trying to be closer in communication with customers.
  • Test your assumptions—it is often instructive to look at the reasons why you have formulated a certain vision. The assumptions underlying our visions may make sense or they may not make sense. Kouzes and Posner (2002) suggest that our visions may be based on faulty assumptions, so it seems prudent to test out a few of our ideas before committing to a certain vision.
  • Become a futurist—whose view of the future does the organization have? There are a number of popular books on future trends as well as organizations that prognosticate about future trends. A committee or group of individuals in the organization should be designated with the responsibility to examine the horizon for future trends, which goes beyond just staying current. Organizations must develop visions within the context of what might be possible in the future, instead of what might probably happen.
  • Rehearse with visualizations and affirmations—rehearsing with visualization is a common practice in athletics, but it is surprising that we do not practice the technique more in organizational settings. Managers can practice the skill of visualizing the future by choosing a reference organization and brainstorming about what an appropriate vision for the future would be. The more leaders spend time imagining what it will be like for the organization to attain its vision, the more likely they are going to identify potential obstacles that can be resolved and also be mentally hardened to accept stumbling blocks along the way.

Reference

Kouzes, J.M., & Posner, B.Z. (2002). The leadership challenge (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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