Collaborative Product Design

Chapter 7. Identify a Concrete Vision for Success

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Identify a Concrete Vision for Success

If the three little pigs all agreed on their goal to build a place to live that would shelter them from weather and keep them warm, why did each pig build a different house?

Even though goals point to what direction to go in, they don’t tell you where to stop. Goals are a direction, not a destination. Everyone on the team might be building the house, but everyone’s building a different house. You can help your team members all imagine the same house.

Just as everyone on the team should have the same answer when asked about the project goals, everyone needs to share the vision of how the end state will appear. In this chapter, we’ll apply some principles from systems thinking that can help teams create and envision the future together.

I often pair this exercise with the goals activities from the previous chapter as part of kickoff and discovery workshops. It’s also useful any time you want to think about where you are now and where you want to go. Just like with goals, we’ll look at the more formal version first and then explore variations you can use in other circumstances.

How Future-State Envisioning Works

Future-state envisioning uses a brainstorming technique called framing to generate a concrete vision of what the ideal future could look like (Figure 7-1). It’s based on a technique explored by Russel Ackoff1 in his book and writing on idealized design.2 It ends by ...