Toward the end he added a pargraph on the "shared vision fabric."
David, I agree wholeheartedly with your statement: "I think of creating
shared vision as a never ending journey which always has room for the artists
interpretation and modification."
Too often, management teams are taken off site by an internal or external
consultant for two or three days to create a shared vision for their
organization. Although I believe this tactic is slowly changing as more
internal and external consultants look at the deeper meaning of what it means
to truly "share" and how vital this shared "vision" is to an organization, I
believe that we need to continue to challenge our assumptions about the
visioning process and allow our mental models to be opened to new ideas..
I recently subscribed to "The Systems Thinker" published by Pegasus
Communications. In the October issue of this newsletter there was a
wonderful story that led the reader through how a middle school in Tuscon,
Arizona carried out their visioning process.
They wrote about the "evolution" of a shared vision because "we believe that
attaining a vision is a never-ending process."
In closing, the article provides a quote from Margaret Wheatley's "Leadership
and the New Society": "We have most often conceived of vision as thinking
into the future, creating a destination for the organization. What if we saw
a field of vision that needed to permeate organizational space, rather than
viewing vision as a linear destination."
Let the journey begin!
Joyce D'Ambrosio
Quality System Implementations
San Jose, CA