“When I read it my heart sank. The vision statement didn’t reflect our university at all. Our soul and passions were nowhere to be found,” a dean at a major American university explained to me last week.
“How could that happen,” I asked. “Wasn’t this a collaborative process where people came together to talk about possibilities, aspirations, and how to build on your formidable strengths?”
“Nope,” he replied. “The president wanted this to be done fast. He hired a consultant and had some meetings with him, and then the consultant sent us a vision statement three weeks later. When we read it, we couldn’t tell that it was for our university. It could have been for any major university.”
“But you could have had speed and participation and you would have ended up with vision and beliefs that mean something,” I suggested.
“That’s not the perception. The feeling is that if you involve people, it will take a long time.”
I hear this a lot from executives. It would be “nice” to get people involved, but we don’t have time for that. Here’s the flip side: if you don’t involve people, you’ll end up with something that is ignored, something that requires enormous energy for “buy in,” something that people don’t feel motivated to make real. Your vision, plan or strategy will likely get stuck when it comes to implementation.
The real opportunity is to use new talent and techniques for facilitating collaborative planning so that you can achieve participation and speed.
Check out some of the “open source” collaboration and positive change techniques like the Art of Hosting, World Cafe, and Appreciative Inquiry. No proprietary methodologies here. Just brilliant approaches that work.
Innovative organizations like Google, The Gates Foundation, the city of Columbus, Ohio, and many more are adopting these approaches into their cultures for one reason: tapping into your own talent in new ways is the best way to ultimately achieve more, more quickly and in more meaningful ways.
