How To Set 2025 Goals with Vivid Vision!

Once you've rolled out your Vivid Vision, you're not really going to get complete buy in right away from all of your employees. It's because the company, as it stands today, is so vividly different from what the Vivid Vision says. And it's hard for teams to see that and feel it right away. But over time, month by month, quarter by quarter, the more you talk about the Vivid vision, the more that managers and leaders mention the Vivid Vision, the more that it's read and reread, the more that you'll start to figure out how to make sentences come true. Your team, over time, will start to buy in. It happens slowly. And when it does, watch out, because all of a sudden you start becoming a little bit more than a business and a little bit less than a religion. Everyone has heard me for years talking about the Vivid Vision concept. What a Vivid Vision is is a four to five page written document that the CEO of your company has crafted and drafted and outlined and distributed to to everyone in the organization. It allows everyone in the organization to see what the CEO can see. The reality is, most companies only have a mission statement. It's that one sentence, useless statement, where we mashed up a bunch of words, put them all into one sentence and said, go team. And that was supposed to align our company. Well, we all know they never worked, but we didn't have anything else to use in their place until now. The CEO of the company is responsible for clearly pulling the vision they have for the company out of their minds and and sharing it with employees so that the employees can help make it come true. The Vivid Vision document is how that happens. This module also shows leaders how to write a vivid vision for their business area as well. If leaders are crafting a vivid vision for their area, it may only be one or two pages, but it follows the exact same process of writing the Master Vivid Vision document for the organization. It becomes an amazing tool for aligning everyone in the company. This visualization process is grounded in science and in sport. In science, what your mind conceives and believes it can achieve. When you can clearly see something in its finished state, it's easier for the mind to figure out how to make it come true. In sport, athletes will visualize themselves performing the event for days and weeks and months before they actually are performing the event. They'll replay the vision of themselves in their event over and over in their mind, performing it over and over again in their mind, so that when they're actually in the act of performance, when they're actually in the act of sport. They can almost do it completely on instinct. Home builders also use this process amazingly well in the business world. The contractor isn't really the CEO of building the home. The homeowner is. The homeowner has a vision for what they want their house to look like. They have a vision for what they might want that kitchen remodel to look like. But if they don't clearly articulate that vision to the contractor, there's no way their dream home will ever get built. It'd be a disaster. It would be a project that might look great, but not necessarily what the homeowner is looking for. And you'd have all the workers trying to build something instead of all being on the same page. Instead, what happens? The homeowner shares the vision of their home with the home builder, shares it over and over again with drawings and sketches and pictures, talking about their ideas enough until the contractor has enough clarity to go off site and draw blueprints and plans to make the visions of the homeowner come true. Once the blueprints or plans have been signed off on by the homeowner, the blueprints can be handed to the workers and the workers can actually build the home without ever needing to speak to the homeowner. This process of getting the visualization, the vivid vision into the planning process is exactly why the vivid vision is so important inside of your company. Imagine if all the employees in your company could really read the mind of the CEO. Imagine if employees knew all that the CEO could picture the company becoming. Once that's true, there's no more trying to organize people or hold people accountable or herding cats. There's no more frustration, and everyone has the same level of intuition as the CEO. What you end up with is everyone in the organization pulling in the same direction. Finally, we talk about who's actually going to be crafting the vivid vision. It's the sole work of the CEO to write the Vivid Vision document, unless it's a VP or a director writing one for their business area. The CEO's job is to articulate the vivid vision for their organization. And then the leadership team gets to figure out how to make that come true. The CEO might get other people's ideas and incorporate it, but it's not a kumbaya group hug. The CEO is responsible for vision. The leadership team is responsible for figuring out how to. Most CEOs are in touch with the general ideas their team have anyway, and those ideas naturally get included. The only time that more than one person will actually write The Vivid Vision is in the case of co owners or the rare case of co CEOs. But let's say there were three founding partners in a business. Those situations are when each of the three owners will go off site. They'll all pull their independent rough ideas together. They'll merge them into one rough document after significant discussion and maybe even debate, ending up in a rough draft that they both agree on fully. The Vivid Vision document is a three year vision. You only lean out three years into the future. If you go five years or two years, it's too far out for people to really wrap their heads around. And if you only go out one year, it's simply too close to today and it doesn't provide enough excitement or tension in the organization. So three years is the perfect amount of time to write your Vivid Vision. Three months prior to starting the next Vivid Vision exercise is is time for the CEO to get off site. Vivid Vision documents tend to end December 31st of the third year. Some companies tie their into a fiscal year if they operate with that cadence as well. But January 1st is the perfect time to launch the start of the next three year Vivid Vision. Launching the Vivid Vision internally a month or two prior to the start of the year, where you get your leadership team and your employees to start rallying around the launch of that Vivid vision that's coming January 1st is a great way to start getting buy in in the planning process happening as well. I first learned the concept of the Vivid Vision from a high performance sports psychologist in 1998. I was at an Entrepreneur's organization event in Vancouver and after working on my first Vivid Vision for a private currency in a barter company that I was building and then later using one at 1-800-got- junk, it really started to solidify how badly this tool was missing inside of organizations and how much all companies needed one. Once the CEO writes and shares the Vivid Vision Document, it becomes a filter for all of their decisions. Leaders and employees start to become so clear on what they're building that it allows them to become more intuitive in the day to day. It allows them to figure out what to work on to help make that Vivid Vision come true. The Vivid Vision document aligns everyone so you're no longer trying to align them day to day. The Vivid Vision also becomes like a magnet, attracting new employees into the company and repelling the wrong ones before they even show up to a job interview. The Vivid Vision also prevents you from hiring the wrong people because they know they don't fit when they read the Document, it actually pushes them away from the organization and it attracts the right fit people in like a magnet. The process of writing a great vivid vision is much simpler than it seems when it's done right. It doesn't have to take that long either. The starting point is getting out of the office, going somewhere where you're inspired, somewhere where you're around nature with no laptop, no iPhone, no computers, just. Just you and a notebook and a pen. And allow your mind to drift, allow your mind to dream, allow your mind to think about the company three years in the future. Start picturing yourself in the future. In fact, pretend that you hopped into a time machine and you travel out three years into the future and you get out of the time machine and you walk around your company. Remember that you're writing down what you see, not how you got there. You're describing your company in vivid detail three years in the future, not how you made that happen. I suggest that if you're writing a vivid vision for your company, or if you're writing one for a business area, you start off by doing a mind map where you just jot down a whole bunch of points as they come to you, organize them into rough sections, maybe come up with three or four bullet points about each area of your business. Three or four points about what your customers are saying about the company, three or four bullet points about what employees are saying about the company, three or four points about how your suppliers describe your company. You include a few points about what the media is writing about you in the press, how you work with your lawyers, your accountants. You're going to have three or four points describing operations and IT and marketing and sales, all of these different aspects of your business. You're going to be describing what it looks like, how they act, how it feels. I want you to describe your office environment, your company culture, how you're leveraging technology, your meeting rhythms. This whole vivid vision document is going to describe your company and how it looks like, acts like, and feels like three years in the future. Again, you're writing it in the current state as if it's already come true. And you don't need to include a lot of numbers and metrics in the document either. It's a lot less measurable. It's much more of a qualitative description than it is a quantitative measurement. After you spend a few hours coming up with these mind maps and lists, you can start to create your first rough draft. And this is a draft that only you're going to be reading, so don't worry about being perfect. What you're starting to do is organize and pull all the points together and your rough points and organizing them by sections, making sure that you're not repeating any of the points. Your first draft will end up being three or four pages long, and it'll feel like it's probably 80% completed. And don't worry again, no one's going to read this document. It's just meant to be a starting point for you so that you can flush out any more ideas that you might have. Once you've written this first rough draft, you'll see that you may have more ideas to add into a couple of other sections. This final draft that you're going to be crafting will include your company's core purpose, your bhag, your core values. But you're just going to be stating your core values here. You're not going to really be expanding on how people living them. You don't want the document to become a seven or an eight or a ten page vivid vision, because no one's going to read it. After you've come up with this final draft of your vivid vision, your job is to write one more draft again, the second draft that is only going to be used by you before you hand it to a professional writer. I'll even use Siri or Otter AI and I'll walk around recording sections because it's sometimes easier to get the ideas out of my head than it is to type them all up. But I'll edit it all together so I end up with one solid draft that's about four pages long, where I don't need to add any additional ideas to it. Once that part of the draft is done, I'll do a final rough draft of editing so that it sounds okay. But my job is to now find a copywriter who can make it pop off the page. The job of the copywriter is to take your second draft and really make it pop off the page so that it flows, so that it's grammatically correct, but it also kind of magnetizes and pulls people together. It's also critical again to write it in the present tense, because what you're doing is describing the company three years in the future as if it's already come true. Make sure that it reads well, make sure that it has all the correct punctuation, and you want it to be like a magnet, that it's attracting a bunch of people and again pushing some people away. Once the copywriter has perfected the wording, a graphic designer will Add all of your company's colors and design elements to really make it feel like your brand. This is a crucial step to getting it right. As all your employees, potential employees, customers, potential customers, suppliers, bankers, everyone is going to be reading this vivid vision and you want to bring them into the future of your company as much as possible, pulling them towards you. So the design elements is just as important as the copywriting is as far as the design elements go. For your vivid vision, as long as your website looks great, your vivid vision should look and feel like your website and brand. But you may have to update your website as well. But that's what you're looking for is something that feels like your brand. And you're trying to actually get people to understand what the company looks like in the future. But it already starts to feel a little bit like your organization as well. Once your vivid vision is completed, it's all about rolling it out. And once it's written, you have to roll it out internally to the leadership team first. You really want to make sure the leadership team has confidence in that vivid vision. And then you're going to roll it out to all the employees. What I like doing is having an all company meeting, either in person or virtual. But I give a copy of the vivid vision to all the employees. Ideally, they have a hard copy in front of them. And what I want them to do is you're going to be reading out the vivid vision together out loud. Have one person read out three or four sentences. Have the next person read out three or four sentences until the entire document is read. But as the document's being read out, ask people to circle any of the sentences or the parts of the vivid vision that they're most excited about. What you're doing is trying to look for a couple of core points that are going to kind of grab them and tie them into that vivid vision. As you're reading that vivid vision as well, I want you to look for any of the people that feel like they're not really buying into it, because those are some of the toxic, cancerous people you have to keep an eye on. You might be looking to get those people out of your company at some point as well. After the entire document's been read, ask your team to mention the words or the sentences that they were most excited about. Ask 10 or 20 people what they're excited about. You'll start to really feel a super cool energy within the group. It's also important to remind them that a lot of the points of the vivid vision aren't going to come true for at least two years. Some parts won't come true until the third year. Some parts won't come true until the second year. Some parts might not happen until fourth quarter and third quarter, but remind them that it will actually get built up. Almost like building a home where you build in the foundational and then you kind of grow up from there. But over time, quarter by quarter, each sentence will start to come true. A fun quarterly exercise to do is to open the Vivid Vision document as a word document and start highlighting the sentences that have come true in different colors. So let's say that after a first quarter, you highlight six sentences in green and maybe you've got three other sentences in yellow that you're working on them. After the second quarter, you highlight six more sentences that are now green and a few more that you're working on. Over the time, you'll actually see that Vivid Vision document. The internal working one will become more and more green. And it's kind of cool for your employees to see that happening. You're going to start sharing the Vivid Vision with everyone quarterly. You're going to be sharing it quarterly with your employees, your customers, your suppliers, potential employees, your bankers, your lawyers. You want everyone to see with clarity where you're going with the company so that everyone is inspired to help make parts of it come true. And as well as sharing it ideally with all of these groups quarterly and asking them to reread it, you're also going to be posting it on your website, on your social media pages. You'll even be sharing it with the media when employees apply for jobs. Our team doesn't even read the resumes until after we send them the Vivid Vision, asking them to read the Vivid Vision and email us back with a video about why they want to help make it come true. Due to your strong company culture and rolling out the Vivid Vision, you'll be amazed at how many more resumes you start to get for some of the roles you're recruiting for as well. Once you've rolled out your Vivid Vision, you're not really going to get complete buy in right away from all of your employees. And that's okay. It's because the company, as it stands today, is so vividly different from what the Vivid Vision says, and it's hard for teams to see that and feel it right away. But over time, month by month, quarter by quarter, the more you talk about the Vivid Vision, the more that managers and leaders mention the Vivid Vision, the more that it's read and re read, the more that you'll start to figure out how to make sentences come true. Your team, over time will start to buy in. It happens slowly. And when it does, watch out because all of a sudden you start becoming a little bit more than a business and a little bit less than a religion. That culture really starts to happen because of the vivid vision. Having an audio recording of your vivid vision and listening to it on a daily or weekly basis while working out or as a meditation really makes it easier to visualize and have it come true as well as so the CEO of Morgan Chefs Dan was excited about building a world class company culture, but he was frustrated with constantly trying to explain his vision to the team. He was going crazy with all the random strategic ideas that people would come to him with, and the plans that his COO Roman were always proposing didn't always seem to be aligned with the ideas that Dan had in his mind. His VP of it, Cheryl, kept creating brilliant IT solutions for problems that he didn't care about because they wouldn't be needed when they got to that vivid vision in that future state. And his Director of Marketing, Kelly, kept going after the wrong customer types. Then, after reading about the vivid vision concept in a book called Double Double, he realized that he was clear on what he wanted the company to look like, act like, and feel like in the future, but none of his team were. He realized that Morgan Chefs were struggling with attracting the top talent because the employees didn't know what they were building either. He couldn't get banks to fund his growth because they didn't know what he was building and he was struggling to get his suppliers to treat him like the company about the size that they were about to become. Everything changed once he drafted a five page, professionally written and amazingly designed PDF document that described everything he could see in his mind. When Dan took the time to pull all of his ideas out of his head and he pulled them all together, everyone could finally see what he could see.