Corporate Visioning - Facilitation

Nature of Visioning

“Visioning” is the process of getting any group of individuals, be they in a business, organisation or family, to focus on the same distant time/horizon as a shared destination for their hopes and efforts.  It is an exercise in projection – building on, or letting go of the present in order to travel into the future, in mind and spirit, to “see and feel” how various options could work, and to consider their implications for a business, organisation or family.

Visioning is a creative, cerebral and emotional journey that requires a safe environment in which to dream, share and develop consensus.  Notwithstanding the fact that there are often quite spiritual elements to the exercise, Visioning lays a very proper and workable foundation for intensely practical business planning.

The Visioning Process

We combine years of business consulting with facilitation, mediation and creative problem solving skills to provide an exceptional standalone Visioning service to businesses and organisations of all types and sizes.

The Visioning process is an exercise in facilitated, creative brainstorming, involving a professional facilitator working closely with key members of the ownership and/or management team.  Visioning is usually conducted at a half or full day retreat.  Before commencing, participants are required to complete some preliminary planning work.

The primary objective of the exercise is to project the business into an optimistic future, usually 10 to 25 years ahead, assuming that actual or potential blockers to that future can somehow be overcome.  In the Visioning process there is no requirement to justify or validate “the vision”, or to try to work out how it could or will happen. That gets left to later (see Strategy Planning and Business Planning).

The lengthy timeframes used are designed to encourage and enable all participants, sometimes with a lot of help, to take a serious look at both the future prospects of the business and at their personal futures in and, perhaps, outside it.

Not satisfied that our standard Visioning process is widely regarded as being at the cutting edge of business growth and development planning, we have developed an innovative extension to the process, called the ArtiFac Program.

ArtiFac has been developed in conjunction with specialist consultancy “Self Made”, for use with family businesses and for businesses that take their internal relationship issues very seriously.  The ArtiFac Program uses a series of highly focused communication and performance exercises to enrich, deepen and energise the emotional and relationship aspects and outcomes of the Visioning exercise.

Benefits of Visioning

As a relatively simple, yet immensely powerful process, Visioning is a time and cost-effective mechanism for focusing and energising what may otherwise be largely unaligned groups of executives, managers and family business members to make commitments to common goals.  As such, it may be the first giant step a business takes into a genuinely planned future.