Re: Shared Vision Tough Spots LO882

JOHN N. WARFIELD (jwarfiel@osf1.gmu.edu)
Sat, 22 Apr 1995 08:15:13 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 20 Apr 1995 MSMWHQ01.CKESLI01@eds.com wrote in LO858:

[...quote of prev msg trimmed by your host...]
> Vision statements are most useful (in my mental model) when they introduce
> a new, personally exciting direction. For example, Kennedy's vision of
> "putting a man on the moon and bringing him home safely by the end of the
> decade" is a good example of a vision. It is short, simple, easy to
> understand and the constraints are clear (within 10 years and bringing him
> home safely).
>
> Clyde Kesling
> Corporate Transformation and Strategy
> Electronic Data Systems
> ckesling@knet.eds.com

Re the dialog involving Keith and Clyde, some people in the systems
community have already made very clear the idea that the main reason the
moon shot succeeded was that it involved untrodden bureaucratic territory,
free of the human constraints normally found in organizations.

The tekkie mindset (mental models) invariably looks to tekkie contexts to
explain human difficulties. This is like saying that because cows give
milk, Klingons must as well.

Peered at through human eyes, the great benefit of capturing the essence
of the organization in a vision is that it gives the average human being a
sense of initial conditions, from which the exponential change peddled by
the change agent can take its starting point. It's hard enough to know
how to make a transition into the great unknown when you're given the
initial conditions, but at least you know where the nonlinear differential
equation starts to unfurl its chaotic trajectory. If you start with an
unknown state (as typically occurs in any totally intuitive situation,
free of the discipline of description), it doesn't really matter where you
try to go because you might already be there.

JOHN WARFIELD
Jwarfiel@osf1.gmu.edu