It starts with vision
"Can you help us build an AI strategy?"
"Absolutely. What's your vision?"
"..."
Strategy cannot precede vision.
I have had hundreds of discussions with FORTUNE 500 C-level executives that take some shape or form of the above. More often than not, the "vision" is either in a presentation that was delivered by a top-tier consulting firm that's stored somewhere online, they point back to the mission of the organization, or they're looking to respond to a trend in the market.
Most often, the answer is "We don't have time to get into that right now. We need to get back to our board" or "I need to get back to my boss with a strategy by the end of the month" (I’ve heard this one so many times, I wrote a snarky article about this in VentureBeat).
Practicality becomes an excuse for lack of vision. "I just don't have time to sit and think about the future - I have [you name it] to answer to." or "I have a bias for action."
A bias for action without a vision is like a bias for driving a car without programming a destination into the GPS.
If you don't know what your vision is, for your organization, your department, and your team, then setting a strategy or building a plan is impractical.
Any endeavor worth pursuing starts with vision, followed by strategy, then planning, then tactics, and finally pieces—think chess pieces on a board, like ChatGPT (you can read more along those lines in my article in CIO: ChatGPT is not your AI strategy.
The hierarchy is: Vision > Strategy > Planning > Tactics > Pieces
Envisioning is a skill, not a talent or a gift.
Those who are particularly skilled at envisioning the future are often attributed with the gift of vision and genius, like modern-day oracles.
As someone who has spent decades developing the skill of envisioning the future both individually and in collaboration with others, and who so deeply enjoys the process that colleagues and friends have coined the state of mind that I venture into (“Brianstorming”), I can say firsthand that the process is deeply personal, vulnerable, and can be developed like any other skill.
Envisioning is deeply personal in the sense that it necessitates the personal experiences and synaptic connections of an individual in order for the result to have relevance to the context of the individual, organization, industry, and/or market for which the envisioning is developed.
You cannot pay someone else, regardless of their degree of skill in the process of envisioning, to envision your future or the future of your organization.
Leaders must develop the process of envisioning the future, both individually and collaboratively, if their organization is going to reach, retain, or expand a market leadership position and create lasting value. This process of envisioning the future, as opposed to having it envisioned for them by external advisors, also serves as a foundation of mutual buy-in that can sustain momentum when challenges arise.
Envisioning is a vulnerable act of creation- of imagination, a distinctively human skill, and a skill that can be observed under development in any child. For adults, it becomes vulnerable in that it begins with an admission that the future is unknowable and therefore cannot be controlled, and, like any act of creation, exposes an individual’s thinking process or line of reasoning with others.
This is one of the reasons it is important that organizations transition to operating as social systems instead of mechanistic systems, in which empathy, reason, vulnerability, and candor are seen as skills as valuable as data science, project management, or engineering.
You used to be able to get things done (albeit less effectively) without empathy, reason, vulnerability, and candor, but now that the internet has opened up options all over the world for reskilling and getting new jobs, skills that were often seen as soft and extra-curricular just 30 years ago are now core curricula for any effective leader.
In terms of skill development, envisioning the future is a recursive activity, with lengthy feedback loops, and it can be developed in the same way as any other skill.
No rational person, in considering software engineers who have written particularly elegant functions in JavaScript, would assert that some people were just born to write code and that the oracles blessed them with innate programming talents.
Those developers had to learn the syntax of writing code, the theory, and practice over weeks, months, and years to develop the skill to the point that it culminated in elegant code. This is not to say that individuals do not have natural aptitudes that lend themselves to particular skills, but that those skills are not deterministic at birth, but can be developed well after childhood.
The skill of envisioning the future is developed in the same manner as the skills of writing software or project management: a combination of theory and practice.
As you go into your next meeting, your next brainstorming session or business review, ask yourself and your colleagues: "What's the vision that precedes this strategy, this plan, or these tactics?"
Thanks for reading,
Brian
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