From the comments on improvisation, Andy has added a provocative thought:

Now I am going to propose something. I believe that an organization’s vision is as messy and apparently incoherent as the organization itself. Ask around in organizations with which you work and see if anyone actually has the vision statement committed to memory. They generally don’t. Which isn’t to say that individuals don’t have a vision. But ask them what their vision for the organization is and maybe what they think the organization’s vision is, and start a conversation about the difference between the two.

When I run Open Space meetings, and we are doing visioning, and the agenda gets set, I point the sponsors to the wall and invite them to look at the two dozen or 40 or 50 topics there and say “There is your vision.” The sum total of where everyone in the organization wants to go IS the vision for the organization. Diluting these nuggets of intrinsic motivation down to one fairly empty statement in an effort to extrinsically motivate people does nothing to work with the actual vision that is there.

Vision is a personal thing. In Ojibway culture, one needs to spend a lot of time cultivating a vision. In Ojibway cosmology, humans were given the unique gift to dream and have visions. In fact, human self-fulfillment comes through visioning. It is something which lives deep in the person. When groups of people come together, the vision that motivates them is their own. If that vision connects with others, then you have an organization. If not, then people don’t come together to work.

You can point to commonalities in the visions of people within an organization. For instance, a development NGO might have a motherhood vision statement that says “we’re here to help” because that is a component of nearly everyone’s personal vision. But to say that “this is our vision, and everything we do is motivated by that” isn’t really true. Actions are undertaken by individuals for a greater purpose that simply the “organizational vision.”

So I guess I’m saying that organizations aren’t in fact singular, coherent wholes. They are networks of individuals that come together and come apart all within the frame of a larger mission such as “making cars” or “providing medical care” or “loaning money.” These little networks appear and disappear as they are needed, not because of a vision created to extrinsically motivate behaviours.

What do you think?

I’m not sure, but Matthew Baldwin’s experience of a rare medical condition might just be the funniest thing I have read for a while.

And then I read the comments:

What a Christmas he had. Here’s hoping 2004 is considerably meeker.

mysterium points me to an e.e. cummings poem, which makes a compelling way to start a new year:

It’s year end, and I’d like to publicly thank the many clients who I have had the privilege of working with this year. It has been a great year full of learning, collaboration and interesting work, and it is largely due to people from these organizations:

• Urban Multipurpose Aboriginal Youth Centres Committee of Winnipeg


• Odawa Native Friendship Centre, Ottawa


• British Columbia Treaty Commission


• CitiesPLUS


• Natural Resources Canada


• City of Vancouver Storyscapes Project


• BC Assembly of First Nations


• Union of BC municipalities, Aboriginal Affairs Office


• Health Canada, First Nations and Inuit Health Branch


• First Nations Employment Society, Vancouver


• University of British Columbia, Faculty of Commerce


• In-SHUCK-ch Nation Treaty Group


• Katzie First Nation


• South Central Committee on Family Violence, Winkler, Manitoba


• Aboriginal Community Career and Employment Services Society, Vancouver


• BC Aboriginal Network on Disability


• Sliammon Treaty Society


• Naut’sa mawt Tribal Council


• university of British Columbia, Native Indian Teacher Education Program


• Fraser Region Aboriginal Planning Committee


• Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team


• Council for the Advancement of Native Development Officers


• University of British Columbia, First Nations House of Learning


• University of British Columbia, Faculty of Medicine


• Saulteau First Nation


• dbappleton


• Karyo Communications


• Vancouver Coastal Aboriginal Interim Authority


• Cariboo Tribal Council


• Michael Herman Associates

And Happy New Year.

More about moving dreams to action. This is from skydiver Cheryl Stearns who is set to make a jump from the edge of space to see what is would be like to bail out of the space shuttle at 100,000 feet. Here she describes how she got started in skydiving:

I’m interested in how her dreams were full of sensory perception that led her to have to actually perform the actions of free falling for her to find out if they were right or not. This is a beautiful example of self-fulfillment coming through vision.