My experience is similar to yours re: how accessible a future perspective is. Previously I have worked to address that challenge through learning journeys to visit companies or organisations doing things that are years ahead, facilitating ‘magical’ experiential exercises to ‘step into the future’, using stories, metaphors and analogies to create that rich experience, and also taking an appreciative perspective on what they are already doing and then saying “and what if we took that a little/lot further?”

There is also an interesting dynamic where you can substitute leaps in depth for temporal leaps. That is, if you create a context in which people can be honest, authentic and get in touch with the deepest hopes (and fears) NOW, then that is similar to what they would articulate for a desired future. That is ‘heaven’ or ‘sustainability’ is present now if you look hard enough, it’s just we tend to project it out into the future, and ‘out there’ somewhere.

I mention that because although visioning, backcasting and strategic narratives are great, one of the primary drivers for engaging in those exercises is such that people make very different decisions NOW. Too many times you can run these exercises and individuals can walk out of the room convinced by the vision, but when asked can be adamant that they will not fundamentally change anything about what they are doing now! Co-creating the vision such that it becomes part of the shared language and symbols of a community or organisational culture can help, and there still must be that real commitment to change (which must be preceded by acknowledgment that there is actually something terribly wrong with how things have been done up to the present!).

Does that sound true to you?

One reason, I suspect, is that the future state often represents a situation which they have no lived experience of; whereas the current state pictures point to experiences they’re intimately connected to and which have real meaning.

Nonetheless, it’s crucial to create what the McLeod report on employee engagement called a ‘strategic narrative’. That’s more than just a vision of the end state, it’s a fuller story about the case for why change is happening and the part people play in it.