Trio of True Alignment: Vision, Head, and Heart
We’ve all heard it over and over and over. . . “Write down the vision!” Did you know that you’re 42% more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down?
This statistic is from psychological research completed by Dr. Gail Matthews who is a psychology professor at Dominican University in California.
Writing down goals forces us to take action, and, according to research done by 3M, we process visuals 60,000 times faster than having to imagine things.
Just as writing down goals is useful for accomplishing our personal goals, models and strategic blueprints help companies create and align on future directions.
According to Chris Risdon from Orchestrating Experiences, bridges from what is to what could be can be built by the following documents:
- Future state customer narratives that outline what customers should experience
- Service Blueprints that outline customer operational pathways
- Capability descriptions that define touchpoints required to support the desired customer experience
Upon reflecting on each of these three documents, I was most struck by the idea of using stories (narratives) when thinking about strategic direction. So often, my mental model for “strategy” are the explicit, linear bullet points for what and how. In a business context, I think of stories as being useful for advertising, not necessarily as my go to tool for aligning stakeholders on a future vision. Yet, alignment happens in the head and the heart, and the most powerful stories reach the heart. According to Abraham Lincoln, “In order to win a man to your cause, you must first reach his heart, the great high road to his reason.”
Once alignment on the strategic direction is created, it is important that stakeholders don’t rest on any of the one documents above (the customer narrative, blueprints, or capability description) to pull them through. They need to communicate and collaborate in an ongoing cycle to achieve the vision. Risdon states that “Drafting the intent statement is just the beginning. . . Increasing your chances of success requires ongoing communication, collaboration, and adaptability.” Just as one cannot rely on writing down a New Year’s Resolution to get to the gym consistently, teams cannot rely on a written document alone to fly them to the north star. We must communicate, training our head and heart, to create the future we wish to see.
