Patrick Mosher explains how vision differs from success using the Lakota concept of hamblechi yapi, a deeply felt pull toward a future you're already living. He shares how he transformed vision exercises into "vision stories" at Accenture: participants fast-forward into a future state, embody a persona like "Bob," and describe how they'd act differently. This shifts focus from deliverables to lived experience and emotional resonance.
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I want to talk about vision. And, uh, in a vision is a picture of the future that describes an achieved goal or aspiration. A vision is a picture of the future that describes an achieved goal or aspiration. So a couple things attached to that is, uh, and Amber's familiar with this and will be even more familiar with this, is the Lakota have, uh, a what, what, what would be called a vision quest. Now TV on Yellowstone, you know, uh, had a thing of somebody doing a vision quest. Um, so we've seen it in the media and stuff like that too. Of what vision quests are. But if you think about vision quest, the term itself, it's questing for a vision. So you're on a journey for this. The Lakota term for vision quest is hamblechi yapi. Hamblechi yapi. And if you try to take that as the translation of that, is to cry for a vision. You need to— that desire to have a vision should be so strong that it produces tears. You know, your mission, when you really get down to it, is it produces tears because you're crying for a vision. So in that sense too, when you're gifted a vision in that space, what I've learned is that a vision isn't something necessarily in the future either. You're living it now. So vision isn't something necessarily so far in the future. You're actually living it now. You just have to open your eyes to how you're living it now. It may not look like the vision that you have in your head or the one that was gifted to you or whatever. But if you start unpacking your life a little bit, you go like, you know, I am kind of doing that now. And if I take your life missions and I imagine visions with those, you're all doing that. You're helping creators crush it, Sean. You're helping, you know, you're, you're, you are revolting, Amber. So I've been told. I just needed to put that out there, you know. And, and, you know, Nate, you're helping men connect. And by the way, we've all been doing this for not just since you dreamed up the statement of this movement. I'm doing it for a long time. So you're living into those, those anyway. And also, this is also the stewardship part. Doing the work, you also leave it behind. That's your legacy. But the thing is, is like, oh, I'm going to leave a legacy. I'll think about that when I'm in my 60s. No, you're literally building your legacy now. You're living it. This is all making sense. Okay, cool. Great question. And let me just hipshoot the answer because I hadn't thought about that. Success is an expectation. A vision is. So, so in some sense, success is something that we assess. We match this to that, and then we say, oh, I was successful, or it was a failure. It was a kind of a success. It was an ambiguous victory. So those kind of things. So success is a description of what isn't and our assessment towards how well we are matching against that. When I look at vision, I don't think about assessing a vision of like, you know, am I 90% towards that vision? Which is also, I think, how we get things wrong in corporate when we talk about visions too. We're living it right now. So, so in that sense, this isn't the right verbiage for it, Sean, but I'm gonna say it anyway. In a sense, a vision pulls and a, and success pushes. Okay. It's like the vision is there and it's, it's drawing you. I don't have to assess how well I'm doing against that vision. It's just always drawing me. Mm-hmm. Build a better world for future generations. All I need to do, man, I'm producing a lot of, you know, welling up my eyes a lot today. When I think about building a better world for generation, future generations, all I need to think about is my grandkids. And my energy pops. That's not an assessment. That's not a success because build a better world for future generations in that way, what the vision is, I am and will always fail miserably against it because I can't ensure future generations of a better world. I won't even be here to assess it. Right? So part of it is like, that's what I mean by that. It's like a pull or a draw. And how you guys all stated your things, it's like, Sean, you know, yes, you need to build a business helping content creators crush it. But the thing that's pulling you, drawing you is like you get so frustrated when somebody is that you value, love, know that they've got content in them and they're just stopping themselves. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And you just go like, dude, and you just feel like, I wish I could just surgically go in and pull that thing out so that you can unleash that with them. That's not success. There's nothing about that that is success-oriented. That's vision-oriented. Boy, thank you for asking the question. Did that help? I don't know. I might have just made it more ambiguous. No good? Yeah, I think I want to journal on this some more. I get your point, and I think there's a lot to tease out, so I'm excited. 100%. I agree. So this is good. So, so let me translate this into, uh, a journey, my, my Accenture journey of realizing these things in my career and how I've made those, uh, real. So, uh, back in the late 1990s, there was this thing called re-engineering the corporation. And so there was a lot of stuff around re-engineering, and one of the things that they put out there was shared vision. Which was really cool reading these books about shared vision, but also at the same time in those days going out to South Dakota and being a part of what visioning is for them. And how do I kind of weave those together? And so, um, so then I started in those sessions where they said, well, what's the shared vision? And you guys have all done this or seen this. It's like, well, let's craft the verbiage of what our vision is. And I'm like, we're not going to do that. So I, because of my Lakota background, instead of doing that, they said, we need a visioning exercise. Okay, we can do a visioning exercise. And I'd say, I want you to fast forward when this transformation's done. Describe how things look or feel. I want you to see it. I want you to describe how the people are in it. I'm asking you to fast forward and envision that future, and we're going to create, and I literally called it back then, a vision story. I want you to tell a story of— don't tell me the processes are different because I want you to go forward, be Bob in the future, and then describe to me how Bob is operating in the world. So Bob is going online, he's making these decisions, he's doing— it's like, yes, that's it. It's not that, you know, well, there's these 17 reports that we just created. It's like, no, no, tell me how Bob uses those reports to make decisions differently than they do today. Oh. And so that was the beginning of Patrick's different than everybody else. You want him to do your visioning exercises cuz he doesn't do it like anybody else. You're gonna have to talk about your feelings and not use as many Post-its. Exactly. Um, so, which is great, right? So, so this That's one— that was the first, you know, thing that I did with vision stories. So think about that with your, um, your movements. But also, you know, you're also, um, guys doing daily work too. What's the vision story? You know, I'm thinking about you, Nate. It's like, okay, I, I get the mission, but also you're in a job. This is really helpful for the job too. It's going like, okay, what's the forward vision of like when this, when this offering becomes successful in the world, what's it look like? How do people make decisions differently? And painting that story is such a draw. It pulls people to something other than it's like, here's the capabilities, here's the features and functions, and the benefits are that people are happy and they're more productive.
