Inciting imagination

I’m reading one of the little ZingTrain pamphlets from Ari Weinzweig, and he uses this phrase “incite the imagination” to describe what a vision should do when someone reads it. Incite the imagination. I love that.

I don’t know where it came from, but somewhere in the last 10 years, it became fashionable for business visions to become hyper ambitious, quantified, and weirdly impersonal. Like, “My vision is to help ONE BILLION people become their own boss by 2030” or some shit like that. There’s a zillion different variations, but it’s always some astronomically high number, followed by whatever the business happens to sell. Cool.

And sure, that type of vision looks fine on paper. We’re gonna make the number go up so high that it changes the world! It’s ambitious, vaguely inspiring, and checks all the boxes of a good SMART goal with KPIs or whatever. But what it absolutely does not do for me is incite my imagination. It does not stir my heart. I strongly doubt that anyone hears a vision like that and then starts giddily daydreaming about the future with ONE BILLION PEOPLE who are their own boss and how that world will look and feel. Instead, it’s just some abstracted milestone that is supposedly worth chasing.

One of the things I want to do for Dialogic Studio is help companies write visions that genuinely incite imagination. Not these spreadsheet brained visions that you can’t really argue with, but that are lifeless and impotent. But visions that actually stir up our capacity to see, desire, and act towards a specific picture of the world we want to live in.