Writing your vivid vision with CEO Whisperer Cameron Herold

The CEO of the company is responsible for clearly pulling the vision that they have for the company out of their minds and sharing it with their employees so that the employees can help make it come true. The CEO crafts the vivid vision for the entire organization and the leadership team comes up with a plan to make it happen. The vivid vision document is how alignment happens inside of the company. Now, if you're leading a business area or a unit within your company, this quest will also show you how to write a vivid vision for your business area as well. It's also the same process that you'll use to craft a vivid vision for your personal life. The vivid vision becomes an amazing tool for aligning everyone in the company or in one business unit as well. In fact, leaders who craft one for their business area will stand head and shoulders above their peers in the eyes of the CEO and and coo. After a vivid vision document is crafted, the leadership team gets to figure out how to make each sentence come true over the next three years. If you're the CEO, you might actually 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 make it come true. What you don't want and what you don't need is a board of advisors or leadership team members, or worse still, employees. Crafting the vivid vision for the company. It just waters things down. The CEO must be the visionary of the company, and the leadership team and employees get to figure out how to make it come true. There may even end up being a few employees who don't like the vivid vision. And that's okay. It's the right time for them to move on. When you're creating a vivid vision for your company, you have to get out of your office. If you try to work anywhere in your building, whether you're sitting at your desk or at a boardroom table, or even from a home office, chances are you'll get dragged back into the daily routine and you won't be able to truly let your mind wander into the future. When you're working within an office, your mind will also tend to get pulled back into specific constraints. And that's the antithesis of this exercise. Forget current metrics, forget daily tasks, forget about other business obligations, forget about the looming question of how, and simply let your mind wander. The best way I've found to start a vivid vision is to sit by the ocean, go into the forest, find a spot in the mountains, or even lie down in a hammock in your backyard and start sketching and writing, which is what I did when I wrote my company's Vivid Vision, the company that I created to help other entrepreneurs turn their dreams into reality. A vivid Vision, once it's completed, will be a four to five page description of your company or your life three years from now. The Vivid Vision Mind Map is simply a starting point to gather all of your ideas together on a couple of pages. You can include your thoughts related to your core purpose, your bhag, your core values, and your mission statement within it as well. All of those are critical and will be included in your final Vivid Vision document. Here's how the process of the Mind Map works. The first step is Creating a Vivid Vision is to start thinking about certain questions about your business. When you peer off into the future, what do you see? What do you want to be like when you're in that future? What materializes in front of you is the epitome of success. Don't worry about how you're going to build it, just focus on describing what you see over the next three years. One helpful exercise is to imagine that you're filming every aspect of your business, your employees, your customers, your supplier, relationships, etc. And then play that film in your mind. What does the big picture and the details of your business look like three years out? In order to answer these vivid vision questions, you'll need to free your mind from the day to day worries of running your business and allow yourself the freedom and the concentration to visualize the future. Just like Olympic athletes visualize their performances. Creating a vivid vision requires you to get out of your comfort zone, and I really encourage you to do that to ensure that you're getting creative. Think about the crazy stuff. Maybe something too outlandish to share at a business meeting or even to consider seriously, but write that down as well. I like to use a technique called mind mapping, which isn't so much a formal writing as it is plopping down random ideas onto paper and then fleshing those ideas out later. Mind mapping allows you to brainstorm without having to provide explanations or strategies for achieving each parts of those desired goals. You'll include a few points about what the media is writing about you in the press, a few points about how you work with your lawyers, your accountants, etc. You're going to have three or four points describing operations and IT and marketing. Each area of your org chart will be described. You're also going to be describing what each area of your company acts like and looks like and feels like in the future, I want you to describe your office environment, your company culture, how you're leveraging technology, your meeting rhythms. This whole vivid vision document ends up being a description of your company in detail, and the mind map is the starting point to pull all those ideas out of your mind. Again, the final version will be written in the present tense as if it's already come true. You don't need to include a lot of numbers and the metrics in the document either. It's a lot less measurable. It's more of a qualitative description of your company than it is a quantitative measurement or a series or measurable goals. Here are some of the key areas that you should include in your vivid vision and you also want to make sure that you have two or three points about each areas that you can then build out into further sentences. Every area of your org chart needs to be described. Operations, Sales, Marketing, Finance, it Engineering, Customer service, hr, your C level suite. Each area of your org chart Think about all the circles of influence that touch your company as well. What are the suppliers saying about you? What are your customers writing about you online? How are your employees describing your company on Indeed and Glassdoor? How would your accountant and your lawyer? How would they speak about your company? Also ensure that you describe your company culture, your meetings, your leadership team, the way that you grow, your employees, your metrics, your dashboards, your vivid vision can also include your company's core purpose and core values. A really good rule to follow when you unleash your creativity is to think about during these sessions things that might even seem a little bit bizarre or unlikely. Is it something that you maybe can't quite see happening? Include that in your vivid vision as well. Pretend that you travel in a time machine into the future. The date is December 31st, three years from now. You're walking around your company's offices with a clipboard in hand. What do you see in the office space? What do you hear? What's the buzz or the energy like? What are your clients saying about you? What's the media writing about you? What kind of comments are your employees making at the water cooler? What's the buzz about in your community? About your brand? What's your marketing like? Are you marketing your goods or services globally? Are you launching new online marketing ads or TV ads? How's the company running day to day? Is it organized and running like a Swiss clock? What kind of stuff do you do every day? Are you focused on strategy? Team building, customer relationships? What are the company's financials real about the business, and how are you funded? How are your core values being realized amongst your employees? Look at the road in front of you. Don't focus on how you're going to make it happen. When I was the COO of 1-800-got- junk, I was, by choice, never a participant in the process of creating what Brian, the CEO, called his painted picture. The vivid vision is that description of the future, because I was the how person. In contrast, Brian, the company's founder, was the where person. He looked at the road ahead to see where we wanted to go. If I'd been involved in crafting his vision for the company, I would have gotten in the way by constantly thinking about how we were going to make each sentence come true. Now I know how to get out of the way and stop asking myself how. Sam.