Building Big Goals

A Case Study from World Vision
Atul Tandon
This article provided by the Engstrom Institute

World Vision exists to fulfill the mission of "a vision for each child, a life in all its fullness, a prayer for every heart, the will to make it so." They employ over 22,000 employees around the world, and have been engaged in the task of making this vision a reality for over 55 years. Several years back, after a period of rapid growth in terms of world disasters, and a resultant growth of funds and employees, World Vision engaged in a process of "Big Goaling" to flesh out strategic ways to make their vision a reality. The vision process had taken 2 years of intensive work at World Vision, but they gave themselves only one year to take their vision statement and flesh it out into a statement of goals and strategic objectives. They gave themselves the added challenge of soliciting input from every employee.

World Vision implemented some very creative strategies to garner input from everyone in their organization. First, they solicited input from five events: a conference of 100 directors in Toronto and four regional director's conferences, each with 100 senior-level people. In addition, 20 people, representing each of World Vision's key constituents, were placed on a Strategic Planning Advisory Group. Next, they formulated a virtual conference space with a firm called iCohere, which enabled 14,000 computer users (in different languages) to provide input. Finally, children's groups were formed in 14 countries. The children were interviewed in focus groups, and drew pictures illustrating what the world would look like if they could paint it the way they would like to see it. The final stage in the big goal process for World Vision took place at a summit in Bangkok, with 130 key leaders.

The approach World Vision used, with the help of consultants from Case Western, is called appreciative inquiry. Essentially, it is a strength-based assessment of the organization's greatest capacities and assets in order to create the foundation for an ideal future. What is unique about this approach is that you first mine the successes of the past, and then focus only on strengths and opportunities—not weaknesses or threats. The idea is to create and exploit those features that already give life to your greatest moments, your greatest work, and align those processes, behaviors, and technologies with a greater future. This process allows people to follow their energy and work for the ideas that attract them most.

One of the ideas behind appreciative inquiry is that all organizations go in the direction of what we most frequently talk and ask questions about. Conversations create behaviors. So change begins with the questions we ask—whether we lead with questions about the problems someone is facing, or with questions about what is working well. We use the statement, "what you study, grows." By that we mean that we decide what to study, and that choice creates the reality. If you study low morale, you will learn about all the factors that contribute to it … but you won't learn about high enthusiasm. When you learn about how to reduce costs, you don't learn about growth. In the same way, if you can get your stakeholders to share a positive anticipatory image, they cannot help but move toward it. So appreciative inquiry begins with an image of a preferred future, and then talks about that in various ways until it begins to be a reality.

Another idea behind appreciative inquiry is that focusing on the positive makes our weaknesses irrelevant. Peter Drucker, in his book The Coming of the New Society, writes that "the job of leadership now and in the future is to align our strengths so that our weaknesses become irrelevant." What would happen if your organization aligned itself around its strengths? Perhaps you would grow at a rate you can't imagine.

So how does the process of appreciative inquiry work? You start by getting all your stakeholders in a room (it could be a virtual room) so that the whole system is represented. Then you go to the best of your past so that you can create a bridge from the best of your past into the future. One reason appreciative inquiry worked so well for World Vision is that it begins with story-telling, which crosses all cultural boundaries. When all your stakeholders are together, you ask them to tell stories: "Tell us a time when you felt the goals and priorities of World Vision (insert your organization's name) were helping you to be at your best. Tell a story about a time when you were able to get support for the priorities that you thought were most important to your work."

When you've gathered the stories together, build on the common themes. Listen for the common ground, the things that keep coming up in various stories. At World Vision, we first gathered stories from the online community, and we put them into categories. Then when we had the summit at the end of the process (in Bangkok), we gathered the stories from the leaders there.

The general process at the summit consisted of four stages:

• Discovering the positive core (this is the story-telling phase)
• Dreaming—imagining the future as if you were actually in it today, and describing what you see. Again, we pull out the common themes that arise from this process.
• Design—pulling out the priorities and strategic objectives that will help you get to the preferred future.
• Destiny—how can you empower and construct the organization so it supports you in moving ahead?

Each of these stages was done, a week at a time, with the iCohere electronic system before the Bangkok summit. One of the things we as consultants learned through the process at World Vision is that there is something about getting together with the whole system that brings out the best in people. We're taught that a good size of a good decision-making group is 10-14 or 7-12. But that isn't true. You can get better decisions quicker, and launch change initiatives more effectively, by getting the whole stakeholder system represented at once. Of course there will be more differing opinions, but somehow just knowing that we're all represented brings out the best in us. When we see the whole, we see possibilities that we don't see day-to-day in our offices or departments or regions.

One interesting outcome of appreciative inquiry is that you end with change being initiated, not with a list of recommendations. World Vision came out of the big goal process with three aspirational goals—summary goals for the next 15 years—and eight strategic focus goals that cover the next 5-7 years. But they weren't goals that had to be talked about more, researched, or voted upon. Rather, the process of telling stories and finding common ground begins a process of change. It goes back to the idea that what we talk about is what begins to change. People naturally move toward the ideas they've talked about and hold in common. They self-initiate participating and making those ideas become more actionable from the summit onward. That's the hallmark of appreciative inquiry: Talking about positives from the past naturally flows into achievement of our goals for a more positive future.

Adapted from a presentation at the 2005 CMA Conference. The workshop was led by Atul Tandon, Senior Vice President, World Vision International, and representatives from the consulting firm that led World Vision through the appreciative inquiry process.