Creating your vision with a Why Discovery

4 April 2023

Vision

Why you need a vision

Organisations need the right people on the bus to succeed and the right people require a job that is more than just a job. If you are serious about scaling a business and retaining great people, you need a vision, the multi-year vision that drives everything you do.

The vision is not a statement of what you do, it is WHY you are doing it. Why your team should work harder than your competition, why they should care.

At the end of the day, most businesses are driven by people and people need to be inspired to go that extra mile. Of course, they will be excited by cool technologies and the industry itself, by the opportunities given, but to truly get the most out of people, you need to give them an emotional reason as to why.

A Company’s vision will usually begin with the founder's vision. A truly great company will have a founder driven not simply by economic incentivizes but rather by a mission that gets them up every day and impulses them to work as hard as it necessary to bring their vision to life.

That vision will convince the second person to join the organisation, then the third, and the company grows.

Eventually, the founder becomes one of many colleagues at the company and if you truly want to scale, the vision may begin to shift and that’s fine.

Once your company reaches thirty people, it will become vital to embark on a Why Discovery, a technique pioneered by Simon Sinek. It takes the form of three workshops, designed to bring out the emotional connections that your team have to your company.

Once you understand what makes your team excited to come to work every day, you can adjust your vision to empower a broader group of people, compelling them to drive the business forward out of a desire to ensure that this vision gets to impact the world.

Use a Why Discovery to create your vision

Read Start with Why and Find your why

First, you will need to collect as many members of your company as is practical to do. Three or four groups of six people work the best and each group should be as diverse a mix as possible. You shouldn’t have everyone in your sales team in one group, they should be spread amongst all of them.

With your groups set up, you will have three discussions, and after each discussion - you will share some highlights with the other groups

Discuss a time when you felt generally proud to work for XXXX
What was the verb or doing word that best describes each story from discussion 1 (ie Support, Help, Engage etc)
Discuss how the stories shared in Discussion 1 impacted OTHER people

Once complete, you can use discussions 2 and 3 to create the why statement which will look something like

To [verb/adjective from discussion two] so that [the outcome of discussion three]

The outcome may well read like it was paid for by an advertising executive, it may feel quite generalised and perhaps be close to what a competitor may use but that doesn’t matter. Because you have gone through the above steps, you know that this vision elicits an emotional reaction from those at the company. Because the vision statement was created from emotional discussions, it will always carry an emotional weight.

If you'd like to conduct a Why Discovery, we'd be happy to help