10. Imagining Perfection

The biggest blocker to you and your organisations success will be the limitations of your own thinking.

Building innovative, transformational level, improvement from the baseline of today’s way of working can be extremely hard, its often near impossible to see the wood from the trees!

To counter this it can be useful to be creative, considering a truly perfect state as a baseline for reflection, a vision created without the hinderance of todays complexities and limitations.

Creating this ideal vision of how your organisation should be configured, its aspirational characteristics and how it serves those that benefit from its products and services can be an enlightening and freeing exercise, especially when undertaken in a dynamic, collaborative session.

Curating a creative vision

Assemble a diverse, multi disciplinary team around a large sheet of paper and provide coloured pens and anything else you might like to encourage a creative approach.

Set yourselves the challenge of imagining you are setting up a brand new, perfectly considered organisation with the same purpose as your own. What would that look like?

To stimulate and capture your conversation, create this perfect state in a metaphorical picture, sketching it out like those shown below.  Decide on a subject matter for your picture and allow that to drive discussion and imagination.

Consider representing within your drawing how you might deliver the perfect product or service to your users, every time, with a perfect use of resources and no frustration. Consider growth, expansion and the continual development of your processes and those involved.

Reference your organisational values and how they might manifest.

Consider your organisation from the point of view of its shareholders, its users, customers, clients and employees.

To further stimulate discussion, consider the very best services you have received recently from other companies – what made them great? How could that be integrated into your visionary drawing?

Some people will jump into this process immediately and some will find it a little more challenging; encourage all members to contribute their unique perspectives and views – they will all be worthwhile.

The ideal state picture will help clarify your organisations purpose and direction and provide the facility for you to communicate key concepts while weaving them into a story like narrative; making the information more memorable and impactful for the entire team and motivating the effort toward perfection.

Once the picture is completed, capture the salient points of the discussion for future reference. They need not be too specific and certainly don’t worry about how it might be achieved. Focus on describing what makes it great and what it might look and feel like.

These attributes are your 'design principles' to guide the creation of your organisations future state and will help define the strategic activities that need to take place in the next year to achieve it.

Finding structured yet creative ways of going about collaborative work is critical to the development of ourselves and those that we work with. Take the time to promote free thought and watch your organisation develop as a product of utilising the creativity within it.