I’ve written extensively about the central role of vision to team/organization leadership and personal growth. Learning about the incredibly magnetic power of imagery and picturing my preferred future at age 18 dramatically changed my life. It’s clearly what set me along the path to the work I do now.

Improvement Points subscriber, Larry Beckon, responded to a recent Improvement Point about visioning with an e-mail, that he is printing out two copies of for filing for himself and to share with others. Here’s the Improvement Point he was referring to:

“Goals follow out of the Focus and Context of our visions. They are
shorter-term steps toward our longer-term vision. Especially in
today’s fast changing world, most detailed strategies or sets of
plans aren’t relevant for more than a few months. Effective visions
define what we want us, our team, or our organization to look like
well into the future. To set goals is to be reasonable. To vision
is to be bold.”
- from Jim Clemmer’s article, “Visions Provide the Energizing
Context to Reach Our Goals” (click title to read the article)

This article explains how visioning is often confused with goal setting and provides a management/leadership chart from The Leader’s Digest to show the differences. I find many people continually confuse these two complimentary and intertwined elements. Vision grabs our hearts and goals appeal to our head.

You can find an extensive collection of articles and book excerpts on personal visioning (and the intertwined concepts of values and purpose) at https://crm.hr.com//en?i=1116423256281&s=&t=/Default/openExternalURL&url=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5qaW1jbGVtbWVyLmNvbS9wZXJzb25hbC12aXNpb24tdmFsdWVzLWFuZC1wdXJwb3NlLnBocA%3D%3D". The Leader Letter archives have past postings and items on this topic at http://www.jimclemmer.com/newsletter/?cat=19.

There’s another collection of articles on team/organizational vision, values, and purpose at http://www.jimclemmer.com/vision-values-and-purpose.php.