Visioning with Groups

One purpose of visioning is to describe a desirable and compelling future, which will motivate people within an organization to work, in a purposeful way, to achieve the vision. Another purpose of visioning is to stimulate thinking about the strategies and actions the organization will implement in order to realize the vision.

VIS-IT Techniques help visioning with groups in the following ways:

• Focus thinking with explicit “Focus Questions” that elicit the description of plausible, desirable future events and conditions.
• Use highly visual tools, which can be freely moved around, and which have distinctive colors and shapes to classify ideas by meaningful distinctions,
• Capture and build a comprehensive group memory.
• Generate decisions and commitments.
• Facilitate communication and follow-up.

Suggested focus questions are:

• What are the performance goals and indicators that must be adopted and implemented to align the organization toward a shared purpose and vision? What will the state of those indicators be when the organization has realized its vision?
• Considering that we are now five years into the future, what are the new behaviors, activities, values, capabilities, goals achieved and other states or events we can observe in our employees, our leadership, our customers, our suppliers, our investors, and our dealings with the community?
• What are the strategies, decisions, or actions that will have to happen in order for our vision to be realized, and when should each occur?