To reach your big goal, you need to sell where you're heading next

Link: Know Your Point C, by Corey Ford

There’s so much packed into this idea:

“You started at Point A. Now you're at Point B. To reach your big goal, you don't just need to paint a picture of the long-term vision. You need to sell Point C: the concrete, vivid destination you will take yourself, your team, and your company to over the next twelve to twenty-four months.”

I’ve worked with so many teams where the Point C is essentially defined as: “continue existing”. And on one level, sure, it may be a good idea to find a sustainable path and keep plugging along. But how are you supposed to rally your team and community around that vision? It becomes an argument for treading water, and worse, a way to avoid making an opinionated decision about where the team should head.

Every team needs a mission (why it exists in the first place), a vision (the world it intends to create), and a strategy (the concrete steps to get there). The Point C is a well-defined, strategic, coherent lily pad on the way to that vision. Corey calls it the next fundable lily pad: what “fundable” means probably varies on your context, but it’s always a big decision milestone for your team.

Not every team finds it easy to know where it’s going. I like Corey’s point about prototyping potential futures, and particularly the way it should be undertaken as a collective activity. Implicit is that there needs to be an underlying “why”: why is this the Point C that this team needs to head to? What will you be able to do from there? Is this anchored in the needs of your community — the people you’re trying to serve? Does it hang together as a vision that improves their lives, serves the needs of your business, and inspires the team who will make it real?

And it’s worth asking: who on your team is empowered to define this? Is anyone? And if the answer is “no”, how might that change?