Where you are with your business and where you want to be are two entirely different things for most organizations.
Most CEOs I mentor at one stage had companies that were struggling to grow.
So don’t be put off by the process of identifying strengths and weaknesses. It’s not easy.
One of the best tools for getting started with crafting your Vivid Vision (formerly Painted Picture) is to begin with an inventory of your company or business areas as they stand today. One of my favorite ways to do this is through a SWOT Analysis, which will determine your ‘Current State’.
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
Sitting down to analyze each of these terms as it relates to your company can be extremely eye-opening.
Before you begin creating your Vivid Vision, do a SWOT Analysis. I advise CEO’s that I coach to give all of the key people in your company or leadership team a stack of Post-It Notes (or any small pieces of paper). Give them ten minutes at most to write down one idea per note pertaining to of the four areas represented by SWOT. When time is up, have each person read each of their notes out loud and post them up on a wall by category (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats).
After everyone does this, start taking stock of the current state of your company, and where you want to be headed in the future. This will give shape to the key projects you need to complete in order to make the future happen the way you want it to. Those projects will serve as the basis for your Vivid Vision, and the starting point for your own process of reverse engineering.
What have you learned in any recent SWOTs you’ve done.
