Tumbling into the Vision Chasm Part 2

In which we meet three crews who set sail in search of new lands

This is part 2 of the Vision Chasm series. In part 1, I introduced the Vision Chasm and explored how retrospective coherence can make it seem like successful companies had a vision they were working towards, when the reality is not that simple.

Part 1 created some lively debate, and I want to be clear about something at the start of part 2.

I’m not saying, “no vision!”.

If you naturally (without forcing, debating or skullduggery) have a clear, singular vision for the world, one that inspires you and everyone else in your organisation, then I’m very happy for you. You should absolutely strategise around that vision!

I’m talking to people who aren’t in that position. In other words, most people and most companies.

Because most visions are mushy and vague. Because in most organisations there are many competing, incompatible visions. Because visions can also be self-centred and that’s okay — like the founder dreaming of the day they’ve captured the market (with underpants?) — or like the employees dreaming of finally being able to do their specific job awesomely (regardless of whether that’s needed by the organisation).

What I’ve just described doesn’t sound as pretty or satisfying as a neatly-structured strategy document, but I bet it’s familiar.

What’s also familiar is leadership scratching their heads wondering why the teams aren’t executing on the clear strategy they shared in the all-hands. And employees moaning that leadership don’t even have a strategy, and did you see the state of that slide deck in the all-hands?

A lot of the strategy discourse pretty much tells you to simply try harder to come up with a vision. And it looks like to get aligned, you need a clear vision to align to.

Well today, I’m going to tell you the stories of three teams at one company that did set a clear vision to align to. And three ways they experienced the vision chasm. Plus some clues for how we clambered out of the chasm.

This is all based on actual events, though I’ve changed names to protect the guilty, and rearranged a few details to make the stories easier to follow.

Setting the scene

I was working with the leadership of an app business. Let’s call their app Queequeg. Queequeg was a fun app with amazing viral acquisition, but it struggled with retention. In plain English: a lot of people installed Queequeg, most of them used it a couple of times, but very few people ever used it any more than that.

All three product teams at this company had spent 2 years trying different ideas to get more people to use Queequeg more than twice. Nothing they tried moved the needle.

It wasn’t because they were doing a bad job. Every team was packed with smart, capable and energetic product, design, engineering and data folks who made their shizzle sizzle. They made bets that were well-considered, broke them into neat steps, and designed and built them quickly at high-quality. They had the single best A/B testing setup I’ve ever seen.

All their efforts had revealed a harsh truth: they weren’t going to get more retention through incremental testing. And they’d accepted this.

So the leadership decided to do something different. To bet on a big, bold vision. To create a community in Queequeg.

It was a clear, simple vision. Rather than using Queequeg twice and then vanishing forever, hundreds of thousands of users would stick around to hang out with like-minded peers inside Queequeg.

The leadership set the three teams off on this journey. The teams had lots stacked in their favour

• one clear vision

• cross-functional, collaborative and starting together

• space and time carved out – away from dependencies and free of red tape.

All this, and yet they still tumbled into the Vision Chasm.

All strategy sailing is not the same

Imagine you’re a capable sailor, but you’ve only ever sailed dinghies close to the shore. So you’re used to having visible landmarks to help you navigate, and you’re used to making short hops along the coast.

One day, you’re asked to sail out to sea in search of strange new lands. To do this, you’ll have to sail out beyond the horizon. You’ll be out of sight of all the landmarks you’ve used to navigate, surrounded by only water on all sides. You’ll have to cross deep, unknown seas. You can still use all your sailing skills, but you’ll quickly need to develop new skills to handle long journeys over open water. It’s going to feel at least uncomfortable, if not downright terrifying.

In case it’s not clear: the three teams I described earlier, with their extensive experience of incremental A/B testing, are great at sailing their dinghies close to the shore. The new big bet means they have to sail out into the deep.

Photo by Yuriy Rzhemovskiy on Unsplash

Let’s look at how each of those teams got on …

Tumble #1: when a vision looks like a prophecy

We’ll call the first team Pequod.

When I met them, Pequod had been in a cycle of debates and thrashing with the leadership. They’d not managed to set sail.

Here’s what was going down:

1. Pequod made carefully considered plans for stuff they would build to support and enable the community vision.

2. Leadership challenged their plans. They poked holes in the thinking, pointed out incoherencies. They couldn’t quite put their finger on what was wrong, they just knew the plans didn’t make sense. But they didn’t want to tell Pequod what to do.

3. Pequod thought even harder, researched communities even more, sought more clarity, and tried again.

4. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It had been going round like this for a few cycles when I started working with Pequod.

I soon realised what was going on.

Pequod were taking their inspiration from already-thriving communities. What features did Facebook groups have? How did subreddits handle codes of culture? How did Slack help new members onboard?

But these were solutions to problems Queequeg didn’t have yet. That’s why they were incoherent.

Pequod were planning out the features that would be needed when the vision eventually came true – not figuring out how to make the vision come true.

What they couldn’t see from studying existing communities was how they got started when there was nobody in the community yet.

Pequod were hoping for a concrete roadmap: build these features and community will happen. But the team couldn’t look at Facebook or Reddit today and see the roadmap that was travelled 20 years ago. And it wouldn’t have helped if they could – because Pequod’s starting point was totally different.

And because they didn’t know which first step to take, they were treating the vision as a prophecy. According to the prophecy, there would be millions of users here in 6 months, so they’d better get prepared!

In the sailing metaphor, it was a bit like they were in dry dock, reading different accounts of distant lands and dreaming of what it would be like when they got there. They kept themselves busy loading, unloading and reloading their ship with different sets of tools they might need at the end of their journey.

But they didn’t get out on the water.

Tumble #2: when “solve a user problem” is the problem

We’ll call the second team Jeroboam.

Jeroboam tried to leap the Vision Chasm by following product best practice: solve a user’s problem. Rather like Pequod, they’d recognised that “community” is nearly infinite in scope. How can you know what to build first, or the right order to do things in?

They’d run many workshops where they listed the kinds of problems that “community” might solve.

Jeroboam figured that if they could lock down one real user problem and hold it steady, it would give them a solid start.

In the sailing metaphor, they were looking for a North Star to navigate by. (I’m talking about an actual star here, not North Star Metrics, but the issues with both rhyme.)

The closest Jeroboam got to a crispy problem was a story about someone who experienced a change in their circumstances and needed inspiration from other community members who’d been through a similar change. It was a nice story, but it had three issues:

1. The story covered only a fragment of what a community would be about. Most people most of the time aren’t experiencing that change in circumstances.

2. The story depended on the person experiencing the change already being in the community … presumably for some other reason.

3. The story was one-sided: great for the person needing the inspiration, but how did the others who’d provide the inspiration get there?

Community is quite extreme in terms of how complex it is as a design problem. To be clear, there are design problems where you absolutely can tell a pretty simple story and use it to guide you. I’ve even developed tools to help you with that.

However, the dogma that you must first define the problem and then solve it is mostly a myth, powered by our good friend retrospective coherence. Sure, after success, you can fill in the story beats of the problem and the solution. But beforehand, it’s always way less clear than the books make it seem.

And sure enough, for Jeroboam, their wannabe North Star turned out to be a will o’ the wisp – a mischievous fiery sprite leading the travellers into the bog.

They’d set sail but they were chasing the will o’ the wisp in circles.

Tumble #3: when a strategy doesn’t feel like one

Our third team we’ll call Enderby.

I’d been working with them for a few months. They knew the vision, and they’d heard me say something over and over again: “we can’t know what’s possible at the moment, our strategy is to figure that out.”

And then, in a team retro, a complaint emerged loud and clear: “the strategy keeps changing!”

Changing?! To me, the strategy I’d been repeating for months hadn’t changed a bit.

This made me curious. As I asked questions and dug deeper, I realised that what looked like strategy to me didn’t look like strategy to the folks on team Enderby. They had a different expectation of what a strategy should look like.

We’d been trying out several different directions so that we could learn more. It was a bit like we took lots of smaller boat trips to different points on the horizon to see what we could see.

I saw each of these small excursions as a safe-to-fail probe that would help us with the overall strategy – to help us “figure it out”.

But the team had seen each small boat trip as a strategy in its own right. When we changed direction to visit another spot on the horizon, it felt like we’d changed our strategy.

Strategy is in the eye of the beholder.

The team had that amazing set of tools for designing and shipping incremental A/B tests. They were great at chasing after a specific objective, so that felt like strategy to them.

They’d never had the chance to experience exploring which objectives might be worth chasing after in the first place. That felt too mushy for them to hold on to.

There was a mismatch between what the teams wanted the strategy to look like, and what the strategy did look like at the company level.

Out of the Vision Chasm into the F.I.R.E.

Strategy can be seen as using what’s inside your control to influence what’s just outside your control.

This is intertwined with the concept of agency. What do you feel is inside your control? What do you feel you can influence? And what do you feel is none of your business to touch? This is all intuitive, based on your past experiences in a context. You can’t simply decide that more things are under your control if they don’t feel that way.

We’d defined a strategy that lay outside what our teams felt they had agency over.

They couldn’t see how anything they were able to do today would get them to the vision. Boom! Vision Chasm right there.

So I worked with the team, helping them to figure out the right kind of strategy for them. One that looked more like the kind of crispy A/B testing they were brilliant at, but that was also coherent with the organisation level strategy.

We did this together, by mapping out two things:

1. the small set of constraints that would have to shift for community to be able to emerge at all

2. where we could build on the existing behaviours of our users to try to shift those constraints.

We used a form of Multiverse Mapping (one of my methods) to do this. (Other methods are available.)

To be extra clear: I wasn’t able to help the teams because I’m magic or special. The word “strategic” can be used to mean “more highly paid” or “higher status”, but that’s not what was going on. The difference was that I’d been out on the open sea before, surrounded by water on all sides, and I’d had to beg, borrow, steal and develop tools to deal with it.

And what works when you’re in deep sh… water tends to be small and pragmatic, rather than grandiose. The F.I.R.E. in the header to this section refers to the book by Dan Ward, in which he argues that Fast, Inexpensive, Restrained and Elegant solutions succeed more often than big complicated plans.

The teams I was working with were already good at making F.I.R.E. plans, but had been bamboozled by the big vision. A big vision doesn’t have to mean big plans. You’re always starting with where you are today.

If there’s a secret to strategy, that’s it: start by understanding what’s happening today, and look for where you can make changes to shift the evolutionary potential of the present.

And sure enough, that little switch what got Pequod out of dry dock, Jeroboam away from chasing will o’ the wisps, and Enderby feeling like the strategy was a strategy. We made changes that we hoped would create the conditions from which some kind of community could emerge.

We still couldn’t guarantee that any of the changes would definitely work, or what the community would look like. Whether things worked out in the end isn’t the point. What matters is that the teams could now make coherent plans, identify the kinds of signals they were looking for, take action, and make progress on the open water.

Next time: who’s vision is it anyway?

It turns out that you can manage the evolutionary potential of the present whether or not you’re aligned around a single, clear vision. Which is enormously freeing.

Next time, we’ll talk about how you never really have a single, clear vision anyway, we’ll consider how to play with multiple visions, and we’ll meet Bunnyducking.

Until then,

Tom x

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With many thanks to

Corissa Nunn

for figuring out what exactly I was trying to say in this piece, and to the hardy crews of the Pequod, Jeroboam and Enderby. Sail on!