New Leadership / Building Shared Vision

 

Peter Senge

- Professor at MIT & founder of Solonline

New leadership roles require new leadership disciplines. Three of the most critical disciplines are building shared vision, surfacing and challenging mental models, and engaging in systems thinking. These disciplines can only be developed through a lifelong commitment. And in learning organizations, these disciplines must be distributed widely because they embody the principles and practices of effective leadership.

How do individual visions become shared vision? A useful metaphor is the hologram, the three-dimensional image created by interacting light sources. If you cut a photograph in half, each half shows only part of the whole image. But if you divide a hologram, each part, no matter how small, shows the whole image intact.

Likewise, when a group of people come to share a vision, each person sees an individual picture of the organization at its best. Each share responsibility for the whole, not jest for one piece. But the component pieces of the holograms are not identical. Each represents the whole image from a different point of view. It's something like poking holes in a windows shade; each hole offers a unique angle for viewing the whole image. So, too, is each individual's vision unique.

When you add up the pieces of a hologram, the image becomes more intense, more lifelike. When more people share a vision, the vision becomes a mental reality that people can truly imagine achieving. They now have partners, co-creators; the vision no longer rests on their shoulders alone. Early on, people may say it is "my vision." But, as the shared vision develops, it becomes "our vision."

Five Useful Skills

Building shared vision involves these five skills:

- Encouraging personal vision. Shared visions emerge from personal visions. It is not that people only care about their own self-interest; in fact, people's values usually include dimensions that concern family, organization, community, and even the world. Rather, it is that people's capacity for caring is personal.

- Communication and asking for support. Leaders must share their own vision continually, rather than being the official representative of the corporate vision. They also must ask, "Is this vision worthy of your commitment?" This is hard for people used to setting goals and presuming compliance.

- Visioning as an ongoing process. Today, too many managers want to dispense with the "vision business" by writing the Official Vision Statement. Such statements almost always lack the vitality, freshness, and excitement of a genuine vision that comes from people asking, "What do we really want to achieve?"

- Blending extrinsic and intrinsic visions. Many energizing visions are extrinsic, focusing on achieving something relative to a competitor. But a goal that is limited to defeating an opponent can, once the vision is achieved, easily become a defensive posture, taking an old product to a new level, or setting a new standard for customer satisfaction- elicit more creativity and innovation. Intrinsic and extrinsic visions need to coexist; a vision solely predicated on defeating an adversary will eventually weaken an organization.

- Distinguishing positive from negative visions. Many organizations only pull together when their survival is threatened. Similarly, most social movements aim at eliminating what people don't want; thus, we see anti-drugs, anti-smoking, or anti-nuclear arms movements. Negative visions tend to be short-term and carry a message of powerlessness.

Two sources of energy motivate organizations: fear and aspiration. Fear, the energy source behind negative visions, can produce extraordinary changes in short periods, but aspiration endures as a source of learning and growth over time.

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