Vision Setting for Organizations

Where is your company going to be in five years? Do you know? Does your team know? Do you have a clear picture of your future? There is an old proverb that says that the poorest person in the world is not the one without money, it is the person without vision.

In this session, you and your team will create your vision for your future and develop specific steps to get there. You will be amazed at how short a time it takes to accomplish great things when the entire team shares the same vision.

This program has been used to set the vision for the Los Angeles Times, the United States Geological Survey and St. Joseph University Parish in Buffalo, N.Y.

Thank you for making us a better newspaper

Los Angeles, California

Faced with changing demographics and the decrease in newspaper sales, the President and CEO of the Los Angeles Times asked me to facilitate the Los Angeles Times senior management team and help the company develop a new vision for the future.

The initiative consisted of the following phases.

First working with the management team of the Los Angeles Times, I worked as an Innovation Consultant to help them develop and then come to consensus on their vision for the newspaper five years into the future. After this two-day session was completed, I trained members of the LA Times organizational development team to deliver a series of Vision Building town-hall type meetings throughout the organization. The results of these meetings were a collection of vision statements and vision pictographs that were displayed in the headquarters of the LA Times. Once all of the visions had been gathered from various parts of the organization, I facilitated a session with representatives of the various divisions and the senior staff in which the final vision for the LA Times was adopted.

To summarize:

  1. Vision setting session with the senior management team
  2. Vision development sessions with members of the entire LA Times organization
  3. Sharing visions developed by members of the LA Times organization
  4. Using input from the visions developed by members of the LA Times, senior management developed the new vision for the newspaper’s future.

Vision Statement Defines with Clarity and Dynamism our Parish and its Future

Buffalo, New York

One of the parishioners in a leadership role at St. Joseph University Parish, after taking one of my graduate classes in Creative Studies at SUNY Buffalo State made the parish council, the governing body of the church, aware of my work in creativity and my work in helping organizations set a vision for their future.

This vision development work followed a similar pattern as the work that was done with the LA Times, but instead of members of the organizational development staff delivering the town-hall vision setting meetings, students, under my guidance, in one of my graduate classes in creative studies conducted the meetings. A similar format was followed.

  1. Vision development session with members of the parish council
  2. Town hall meetings conducted with members of the parish to develop their vision of the future of St. Joseph University Parish
  3. Vision sharing session with the parish council
  4. Development of the final vision using input from parishioners town hall meetings.

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