Corporate Visioning
"Corporate 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. 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 their likely implications for the 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. Although there are often quite spiritual elements to the exercise, Visioning lays a very proper and workable foundation for intensely practical business planning.
Our Solutionists combine years of business consulting with facilitation, mediation and creative problem solving skills to provide an exceptional Visioning service for businesses and organisations of all types and sizes.
The Visioning Process
The Visioning process is a Solutioneering exercise involving facilitated, creative brainstorming. A professional Solutionist works closely with key members of the ownership and management teams as their Visioning Facilitator.
The Visioning process is usually conducted at a half day retreat. Before commencing, participants are required to spend a few hours completing some deeply reflective, preliminary thinking and planning work.
The primary objective of the exercise is to project the business, and the people intimately associated with it, forward 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 is handled later in different processes (see Strategy Planning and Business Planning ).
The long timeframes we use are designed to encourage and enable all participants, sometimes with just a little, sometimes with quite a lot of help, to take a serious look at the future prospects of the business, at their personal future in it and, perhaps, an alternative future outside it.
Beyond Visioning - The ArtiFac Program
Our standard Visioning process is positioned at the cutting edge of best practice business growth and development planning. However, not being content to just be at the front of the pack, we have recently added an innovative and powerful extension to our Visioning process. It's called The ArtiFac Program.
We developed ArtiFac in conjunction with the Melbourne-based, boutique consultancy "Self Made", for use with more adventurous family businesses and with really switched on modern businesses that take internal relationship issues very seriously.
Over a two day period, ArtiFac creates and sustains a safe, intense and profoundly personal environment where our facilitators guide participants through a series of highly focused communication and self-actualising exercises. These energise, enrich and deepen the emotional and relationship outcomes beyond what can usually be achieved through the more conventionally-oriented Visioning process (notwithstanding the profound effects that process invariably produces!).
Benefits of Visioning
Visioning is a relatively simple and immensely powerful process. It is a time and cost-effective mechanism for focusing and energising unaligned groups of executives, managers and family business members towards a united commitment to common goals and a shared, common destiny.
As such, it can be the first giant step a business takes towards a genuinely planned future.