Cameron Herold presents the painted picture approach: a 3-4 page description of your company three years from now, instead of a one-line mission statement. Employees and leaders use it to visualize the future and reverse-engineer concrete steps to get there.
Chapters
I'm Cameron Herold.
I'm the author of a book called Double Double and I coach entrepreneurs and CEOs all over the world on how to grow their organizations.
Today, what I'm going to talk about is something around vision. Now, we've all got vision statements or mission statements. Put your hand up if you have a mission statement or a vision statement for your company.
Most often people put these little vision statements or mission statements in place, like one sentence, and it's supposed to align people, and it does nothing. No one's aligned. Everyone's a little bit confused.
I'm going to show you a new way to put a vision statement in place. It's called the painted picture. And the idea is something that we learned from an Olympic coach, this high performance sports psychologist. An Olympic coach was talking about how athletes would visualize themselves performing the event. And he said, if we could almost go in a time machine three years into the future and see what our company looked like in the future, we could come back to today and make it a reality. The painted picture is a written three or four page description. And if you write it, you gotta get out of the box. Take a notepad, go out somewhere where you're around nature, somewhere where you're inspired, and you can literally think and dream about your company. Describe what your customers are saying three years out, what your employees are saying three years out.
If you described your company in that vivid detail three years from now, you could then reverse engineer it and figure out how to make that happen.
Our employees, the smartest people that we get, if they see something different than we see, and at best, they're making their own educated guesses.
You can have all the best people, but if they're not aligned, it doesn't matter. You can have all the best culture, but if you don't have people aligned, it doesn't matter. So it all starts with vision. It's like the foundation of your house.
This stuff really works because people are excited about the future and they can see and feel it. And it creates this complete alignment in the organization that everyone is literally pulling the same way.
