Jorge: 0:00

Don’t, don’t give me the mission and vision statements. Just show up in the world in a way that actually reflects your intent to make that vision come to life rather than telling us about it.

Narrator: 0:18

You’re listening to Traction Heroes: Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Jorge: 0:27

Hey, Harry. It’s good to see you.

Harry: 0:29

Hey, Jorge. Uh, it’s always a pleasure. I’m, uh, glad we’re keeping the conversation going.

Jorge: 0:35

Yeah, same here. Uh, always, uh, look forward to these. Have you, um, brought something nice for us to listen to today?

Harry: 0:45

I have. Um, I read a book a while ago that has left kind of an, an indelible mark on something I talk about often. Um, and so I wanted to share it because a lot of questions come up about it, I think this book does just an outstanding job of getting the conversation going about how to… or one possible way of addressing it. And, uh, it’s, it’s fairly short, um, but let me, uh, let me go ahead and read it, and then I’ll tell you what it’s called, which won’t be a surprise.

Jorge: 1:26

Awesome. Yep, do it.

Harry: 1:29

All right. One technique I recommend you use is the mind map. This is a visual way to organize information. The idea is to start in the center and work out from there with little branches. So to visualize something a little more tangible, think about a tree trunk in the earth, inner core, with its branches stretching out into the sky. Each of those branches contains twigs that extend further out. The mind map works in a similar way, a core that branches out into smaller components. Now, apply this to the world of business. As the leader of an organization, you’re firmly planted at the center, and the various areas that contribute to the business branch out: marketing, sales, engineering, and so forth. With that in place, build off that by describing those branches in about three or four bullet points each. In other words, describe what your marketing looks like and sales and so on until you’ve captured every idea. Remember too that among the branches of your business, you want to consider every aspect of the organization, the vibe, informal codes of conduct, the fiscal environment, the scenery, all of that. Deliberately leave out numbers and data. Get a feel for the place. When you step out of your time machine three years from now and walk around the office, what’s happening? What can you say that is typical of the business three years from now? The mind map is an initial foray into the vivid vision and will act as an outline for the rough draft that you, the leader, will then write.

Jorge: 3:29

I can’t guess what that’s from. I mean, you’ve name-checked, uh, mind maps specifically, right? And I know that there are books. But I get the sense that you’re not reading from a book on mind mapping per se. It, it sounded to me more like a book about applying that kind of visualization technique to understanding the business. Is that, is that right?

Harry: 3:50

Yeah, it’s actually placed in service of creating a written document that helps people understand what the vision of the company or organization is. And. In so many different conversations I’m having, with very senior leaders, the term vision or mission or goals or objectives are just bandied about without any real clear idea what they actually mean and how they should be represented. And when I read this particular description of the process of creating one, it helped me get to a place where I could provide a more cogent explanation of what a vision is, why it’s important, what it means that it’s vivid, and how it can be put to use. Um, so I’ll leave-- I’m, I’m not gonna go into the whole distinction between mission and vision and all of that stuff. So I really wanna focus just for the moment on the notion of the vivid vision, this is from a book by that title called Vivid Vision by Cameron Herold, uh, the subtitle of which is a Remarkable Tool for Aligning Your Business Around a Shared Vision of the Future. Prior to reading this book, when I would describe what a vision was, it was a… The way I would say it was it’s a compelling picture or a movie of the future, something compelling. And was often very difficult for people to really grasp what I meant by that, even though I, I think lots of people talk about visions. And in the work that I’ve been doing over many, many years now, I noticed that the absence of a documented vision is actually, uh, a significant obstacle to getting to work together well. And, uh, the author, Cameron Herold, does an outstanding job of framing what a vision is, why it’s so central to getting people to align and collaborate around what the of the, of that vision would be on the future, and what would be necessary to work from that future back to the present to lay out the structure that ultimately would contribute to a plan that people can believe in.

Jorge: 6:52

I can totally see how that would be the case. I’m trying to connect the dots between articulating that vivid vision and the mind mapping exercise. Is it like the mind mapping is a tool for aligning the team around that vision of the future?

Harry: 7:12

So actually, in this particular case, I think that’s less what the author is saying. I think what he’s saying is in order to create a practical vision, the way to do it is to leverage the concept of a mind map to paint the picture, if you will, of the various components of the vision, starting with, um, sort of the either the, the, the central, the CEO founder’s role, and then moving out to the other areas of the business, and then getting further out from the branches to the twigs. It’s a way of getting from the center to the edges, and then being able to create clear distinctions, uh, among the different either departments or capabilities that the business needs to have so that you have a picture. So you’re, you’re ultimately trying to paint a picture. So rather than starting in words, start with a picture, and use the mind map as a tool for creating some distinctions about what those function-- those major functional areas in the business are, so that you can then speak to them. And then for each of those distinctive areas, start laying out a small number of bullet points and text that describe them as part of the journey to creating what would amount to a, a written record, a document, a narrative that paints that compelling vision of the future, whether it’s a compelling vision of getting away from something not so good, or whether it’s a compelling vision of going toward a, you know, a really awesome, inspiring future, or more likely, some kind of balance between those things. The technique that the author’s promoting here, uh, I have multiple times and just found it much easier than sitting down and trying to write it. I’m not a hundred percent sure why that’s true, um, maybe it’s because it allows multiple people to look at something out there rather than talking about something, um. I’m struggling here for a minute, so l-let me just pause and ask you, to what extent have you been involved with the extraction and/or documentation or articulat-- or articulation of visions in the work that you’ve been doing?

Jorge: 10:06

You know, I was just thinking, um, over my career, I’ve helped many organizations design or redesign their websites.

Harry: 10:16

Угу.

Jorge: 10:17

And it’s not uncommon for vision and mission, these two, these two seeming, uh, counterparts

Harry: 10:27

Ja.

Jorge: 10:28

c particularly when leadership is looking to nail the ubiquitous About Us page in the site, right? Like, which is… It’s interesting because website, designing websites for organizations ostensibly is about creating a destination online that their customers and partners and so on can visit to learn about them, and that’s actually, that’s obviously the outcome of that exercise. But those artifacts are at-- They’re downstream from a series of conversations that require introspection and require talking about what the business is and how it wants to show up in the world. Uh, and if it’s undergoing a redesign, it’s because conditions have changed in some way, right? Something has happened that has motivated them to go through that. So it’s like th-there’s a little bit of like soul-searching happening. So I’ve been part of conversations like that. I don’t-- We, we don’t have to get into, into details about it, but I will say that I’ve always been apprehensive about sharing the statements, the vision and mission statements, as is, on things like About Us pages, because I think that those are-- those articulations are very important. To your point, it’s very important that they get written because they-- writing them requires alignment among the leadership team. Like, everyone has to be on board with the thing. But But nobody else cares, really. And, uh, and those statements should lead to other things happening. They shouldn’t be an end in and, in and of themselves. You know? It’s, it’s a little bit like your, your work is showing here. It’s like, no, no, no. You know? It’s like d- don’t, don’t give me the mission and vision statements. Just show up in the world in a way that actually reflects your intent to make that vision come to life rather than telling us about it.

Harry: 13:05

I think that’s perfect because I, I especially think of value statements. You know, when, when, you know, when a, a company or an organization puts its values down in writing, they’re often just platitudes, and they’re often not stated in a way that makes them actionable. Uh, barely understandable, ’cause often they’re just, you know, some word like integrity or humility or transparency or something, but they’re not stated in a way that says, you know, “This is more important than that. Do this even over that.” And the, the-- I think the reason that I brought this up as a reading is because I have three different examples of, um, that, uh, of visions or, or situations in which visions either would have been valuable, were valuable or, uh, well, let me stop there and just say, like, one of these examples is an environment I was working with a large, uh, international company in San Francisco, over the last year, and the founder, very mercurial, brilliant founder, um, people felt like he was always changing his vision. But in fact, the foundation of his vision was very stable. It’s just some of the higher order aspects of his vision were and evolving very quickly with changes in the environment and the market and the technology around it. But because people never really understood the foundational aspect of the vision, it felt like everything was very squishy. So that was one where ultimately over a period of time in discussions it became clear that that CEO needed somebody who could function as a translator to maintain a sense of what that vision was, even though ultimately it probably wasn’t gonna turn into a document that people shared. But it was somebody who could rationalize the changes against the foundation by first understanding what that foundation was, because as the company evolved over a period of time, fewer and fewer people inside the organization really had a grasp of what the founding vision of the company was. So that’s one example. Another was a smaller company with a very large footprint in the market with its product. So while the company was small, its product was pervasive across the United States anyway, uh, it was a business-to-business company. Uh, the company was really struggling to develop its next, um, product offering because so much of the, the vision for what that company could be was simply tacit and resident inside the CEO founder’s mind, um, and when he would articulate things, um, he would do it in bits and pieces, and it was very challenging for people to bring those back to a, uh, stable core. So once again, it was a lack of some kind of picture that helped people understand what the basis of it was. Um, so one was changing all the time. Another wasn’t changing so much as it was simply, um, and so people couldn’t see where the pieces, like puzzle pieces, fit into the broader picture. And then the third example is a CEO and co-founder I’m working with on a regular basis whose business has dramatically changed, and they’ve lost the vision. Like, they don’t really have a sense of where they’re going. They don’t-- They, they know things are not good, and they want things to be better, but they don’t have a picture of what’s possible anymore, and they’re not able to express it in a way that seems to connect to the market. And that is a very, very challenging situation. So in all of these, in each of these three situations, which I think are emblematic of, you know, lots of companies out there in one way or another, I think figuring out how to get people on the same page about, um, you know, what’s-- what, what, what is the situation they’re in? What is it that’s unique and valuable that they bring to the party? And what could they be doing with it to solve real problems or create real value or make the world a better place? And provide enough of that in some kind of document, whether it’s a, uh, you know, a video representation of it, or whether it’s a textual narrative, or whether it’s a picture with bullet points. In all cases, I think, um, these things would be valuable. But there is that challenge of it’s not the thing itself, like you said. It’s really just on the path to getting people to understand what that thing should be or could be.

Jorge: 18:16

When I think of mind maps The value of a mind map for me, and I suspect this is true for other people as well, is that it allows you to see the big picture. You can map out all the components of it. And in the example that you started calling out, I think that this was in the reading, uh, it mentioned marketing, it mentioned engineering, right? It felt to me like you-- the, the author was describing, uh, a systems map of the business. It’s like these are the components that make up the business. V-- That, in my mind, might be part of the vision, but obviously the business exists to effect some kind of change in the world? And maybe this starts overlapping with mission, right? But I’m thinking, um what was Microsoft’s… Do you remember, like, Microsoft’s, um, that statement? I think it was Bill Gates who said it, that, you know, they aspire to, uh, have every desk in the world have a personal computer on it or something,

Harry: 19:34

I don’t.

Jorge: 19:34

Right?

Harry: 19:35

Yeah.

Jorge: 19:36

B- uh, yeah, I don’t remember exactly what it was either, but without getting into the whole, you know, is it a mission or is it, is it a vision, the picture that you’re drawing when you’re making one of these mind maps, is it somehow inclusive of the world outside of the organization? Or is it just merely let’s capture a s- you know, a, a picture of how the organization is structured to affect, uh, whatever change we want to make in the world?

Harry: 20:10

I think in an ideal case, it would include the stakeholders and constituencies, internal and external, I think about the work that I did very early on with Skype, and Niklas Zennström, the, the CEO— founder CEO, would express his vision. He, he, he did it so simply. He said, “Free telephony.” It was like two words.

Jorge: 20:36

Right.

Harry: 20:36

And he didn’t go into how they were gonna operationalize that from an organizational point of view. And he didn’t really talk about how-- what, what that was gonna mean at any level of detail for the industry or for, you know, the s- the, the stakeholders or the customers or external folks. But you could extrapolate from there in both directions, right? Both internally and externally. So I think a quality vision, a quality, uh, a high quality, compelling picture or movie of, of the, of, of a future that’s near term enough to be realizable but far enough o-out to be aspirational does include all of that, right? And I think that’s part of the power of that mind map, is being able to see it in one place. I think you put your finger exactly on that. It’s very, very hard to do when you’re looking at a document to get a, a, a sense of all of those, um, people and stakeholders and constituents and functions and how it all might relate. I think a mind map is a very powerful tool, very simple, powerful tool for doing that. And I remember back in the, in the old days, I mean, I bought my first computer, my first… My first computer that I put actual money down on was, was a Mac 128, right? And I did that because there was software called Inspiration, which was a mind mapping package. And what I loved about it was that behind every, um, bubble or behind every graphical element, you could hide text. And so you could click on a little thing and open up a little text box and write stuff, and you could fill it all out and look at it through the view of just view, or you could press a button and transform the whole thing into a text view. And it was just genius, um, because it allowed, for me, a very powerful way of writing to lots of things that I couldn’t necessarily see all the connections to and didn’t necessarily have any kind of obvious information architecture for or natural hierarchy so I could work independently across these visual elements, and I think that’s part of what, um, Cameron Herold is getting to here, is it’s y-you may not see all the connections, but if you can articulate what each one of these things would look like in the future in a compelling way and maybe organize it into some kind of narrative later, you’re, you’re gonna be much better off than sitting down and trying to write it out as a linear hierarchical document, um, in a narrative form.

Jorge: 23:30

Yeah, the value there is you are able to both see the forest and get very close to each tree

Harry: 23:39

Mm-hmm.

Jorge: 23:40

so that you can… You, you-- Uh, and I’ve worked with software applications like that. One of my favorite is, uh, called Tinderbox, which is also a Mac applic-- It’s a Mac-only application. Um, and the beauty of that is that you can dive in and flesh out the details of any one particular area, but you can also pull back and see a graphical representation of the entire system. Now, this is very open-ended stuff, and you can use it for all sorts of things. Maybe as our parting shot, you know, in the service of time here, could you offer listeners suggestions as to how you might use this forest and tree sketching format in service of specifically articulating the vision for the organization?

Harry: 24:38

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the step one is try and get comfortable with at least one mind mapping tool, something like MindMeister online, MindJet, which is actual software. I know Tinderbox is your software of choice. It’s very sophisticated stuff. I, I really struggled with trying to get comfortable with it. But something like MindMeister or MindJet or there are any number of fairly simple, um, mind mapping tools and just, if you’re in a leadership position and you’re trying to get people to move to a place in the future that’s compelling and valuable and good, and it isn’t-- if it isn’t documented anywhere, maybe rather than sitting down and trying to spell it out in a narrative, take the time to open up a mind map and just start capturing the components of it as a visual, then maybe, as Cameron Herold, the author, says, put a bullet or two or three down for each one of these things that describes its compelling future state, because that is gonna be the place to get this conversation going. And the rest of this book is fantastic in terms of, okay, what do you do next, and how do you put it into practice, and what do you do with your team, and so on and so forth. But if you’re not-- you’re in a leadership position and you’re trying to get people aligned and working towards something, uh, especially something complicated or complex, start with a simple mind mapping tool and, uh, and, and maybe play with it on something that’s not mission-critical at first, so that if you mess it up, it doesn’t matter. But I’ve found… I, I was surprised very early in my career how powerful this was. I am continually amazed how important this kind of communication is, and being reminded of that, um, in a simple, short book that does a job of laying this out, that’s where I would start.

Jorge: 26:59

Brilliant. That’s a great recommendation, Harry. I’m gonna have to check that out. Thank you so much for bringing it to our conversation.

Harry: 27:06

I appreciate the conversation as always, Jorge. Thank you.