(4) Vision Statement

What do you stand for?

What is a good way to write a vision? I like to stick to this definition of vision: A description of a future state which is expressed in present tense which is the way you wish the world to be if your work has succeeded with big effect. The United States has a prosperous economy independent of fossil fuels. 100% of women in India can choose to graduate high school and attend great schools if they choose to.

Typically, people who are fired up about specific issues feel strongly motivated by solving a problem. Someone who has experienced domestic violence in their childhood might feel full of a vision where there is no domestic violence. So, often visions are stating the opposite of what your problem is. However, when thinking about impact strategy I challenge you to identify deep root causes within your problem space, and describe a vision that is much more bold than merely eradicating the symptoms of an issue. In 2014 in LifehackHQ.co we shifted our focus from reducing suicide rates to envisioning 100% of young New Zealanders flourishing by 2050. Suicide reduction efforts miss the point that our society needs to operate differently to enable all young kiwis to truly flourish.

It's time for you to start articulating, or re-articulating, your vision for the world. How do you want things to be? Can you try to describe a bolder vision than "the problem went away"? The following exercises will help you with naming a vision, and describing a map of key milestones that could indicate you're heading in the right direction.

Exercise

The Adjacent Possible

Some people find visioning easy and some find it hard. I've assumed you and your team find it hard; the following exercise is designed for those who might not normally allow themselves to live into a truly different world. Feel free to use your own process if you have a good visioning capacity as a team or within yourself and find the following cumbersome.

1) Make Space

Take yourself or your team to a special place. That might be your bedroom with your favourite type of tea sitting next to you and a notebook, or it might be a museum or art gallery which you wander through with your cofounder, or a long bike ride around a coastline or lake which is has no hills so you can really get into your own mind through the even pace of your feet. Try a train, a coffee shop, a rented tree house, your friend's fancy office after hours where you have their whiteboard to yourself. Give yourself space to be imaginative and feel the power of your own vision for the world. Find somewhere that allows you to fill and overflow with ideas and possibilities for the world around us and how it could be different. If the first places you try don't help you get into flow, keep trying. You have an immense vision inside you, but you might need a special environment to help you open up to it.

2) Depict and describe in many ways

Uncover different elements of your vision using different means. Drawing a city might help you think about how infrastructure might change in your vision. Drawing a family having dinner might help you see how the social reality has changed. Mapping a flow chart of how a young person finds their first job out of school might expose how a new service could be introduced to a school or government program. Tear apart books from a second hand store and find words, phrases and images which capture the essence of what you wish to experience in your daily life in your envisioned society. Make a poetry anthology about the future. Many indigenous cultures consider time to be non-linear; the past and future are one. Use inspirations from ancient times and history to explore the adjacent possible here in the present.

3) Spare time

If the world was already very good at handling the issue you care about, what would you do with your spare time? What would need to be solved in order for you to feel at peace and able to do whatever creative pursuit you have always wanted to do? What would prove to you that the world was changed to that degree?

Mapping Milestones

After you find a way to describe the world you want to enjoy and help create, think of it like something on a horizon.

What's the road to that?

Working backwards: what signals or milestones are on the path to that vision becoming a reality? Pull out some post-it sticky notes or some smaller pieces of paper and start listing. Consider the strategic levers that exist which could be shifted. What would need to be different about education systems? What would need to be different about how policy makers make decisions? What would need to be different about how funding is allocated in medical care?

What are the 5 things which you might need to help shift in society in order for your vision to become a reality?

You can choose more than five, but try to pick some seriously obvious milestones. Try to notice what absolutely has to happen in order for your vision to be realised. Remember this is NOT your to-do list, this is a treasure map of things to contribute to, you will not achieve them alone.