How to write a Vivid Vision for your company

Executive overview

Most companies drift because the CEO never articulates a concrete picture of where they're going. A Vivid Vision is a 4–5 page document written in the present tense that describes the company in detail three years from now.

The CEO writes it alone, away from the office. The leadership team's job is to figure out how to make each sentence come true.

Vision is the CEO's job — execution is everyone else's.

Getting out of your head and onto paper

• Write away from the office — ocean, forest, mountains, hammock in the backyard
• Working inside the building pulls you back into constraints and daily tasks
• Ignore "how" entirely; focus only on describing what you see
• Use mind mapping to dump raw ideas before writing prose
• Include the outlandish — write down things that seem too bold to say out loud

What the Vivid Vision covers

• Every area of the org chart: operations, sales, marketing, finance, IT, engineering, customer service, HR, C-suite
• Company culture, meeting rhythms, leadership team, employee development
• What suppliers, customers, employees (on Glassdoor/Indeed), lawyers, and accountants are saying about you
• What the media is writing about you
• Office environment — what you see, hear, and feel walking through it
• Core purpose, BHAG, and core values can be embedded in the document

How to think about the three-year horizon

• Imagine you're filming every aspect of the business and playing it back
• Pretend you're walking through the office on December 31st, three years from now, clipboard in hand
• Ask: what's the buzz? What are employees saying at the water cooler? What's the community saying about the brand?
• Describe what each area acts like, looks like, and feels like — qualitative, not quantitative
• Metrics and measurable goals are minimal; this is a description, not a scorecard

Who writes it — and who doesn't

• The CEO writes the Vivid Vision; the leadership team builds the plan to achieve it
• Don't involve the board, leadership team, or employees in drafting it — it waters things down
• The COO is the "how" person; if they draft the vision, they'll constantly second-guess feasibility
• Some employees won't like it — that's fine, it's the right moment for them to move on
• Leaders who write a Vivid Vision for their own business unit stand out to the CEO and COO