My Sunday reading today included a great Jared Spool article on the power of Experience Visions.

You can think of an experience vision as a giant flag on a tall post in the sand, far away on the horizon. The flag is too far way to walk to anytime soon. It will take years. (In the case of the Knowledge Navigator, it was 23 years.)

Yet, because the flag is visible from where we currently are, we can set a directive: March towards the flag. Everyone in our organization can have the same directive. We’re all marching towards the same point of convergence, even if we’re starting someplace different.

– Jared Spool, The Experience Vision: A Self-Fulfilling UX Strategy

Recently Mo Jangda and I wrote “Future Stories of VIP” for each other, as a means of opening up and understanding the personal vision for the future of our work at VIP. We’ve since been posting the stories internally to bring the vision to our wider team for discussion and critique. Reading Jared’s article inspires me to continue writing and refining stories that bring to life the experience of our clients in the future.

Jared finishes with a vision for successful experience visions which is akin to Janice Fraser’s UBAD theory of Gaining Durable Buy-in:

You’ll know your experience vision has taken off when other people start explaining it to you, to make sure you’ve heard it.

It’ll really take off when you hear a senior executive, at some organization-wide meeting, use your story to explain where the organization is heading. They’ll be telling the story (probably getting a few details wrong) to everyone, saying “This is where we need to go.”

What happens next is magical. The organization starts to focus less on what the competition is doing. Decision makers ask What baby steps will it take to get closer to our vision?

– Jared Spool, The Experience Vision: A Self-Fulfilling UX Strategy

I listened to Janice explain her UBAD theory as the third tool for uncovering the truth at Mind the Product London, and luckily for us all this talk was videod and is available for your viewing pleasure:

Uncovering the Truth by Janice Fraser

I love it when the streams collide 💥

I’d love to hear from people who’ve used experience visions in their companies, and how they went about creating and utilising them…

(Photo of Whistler Blackcomb by me)

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