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When companies communicate their vision it can be somewhat one sided. The vision is pushed down the communication hierarchy in the traditional ‘command and control’ style. And often generalisations and nominalisations abound. For example: ‘To be the global partner of choice for the automotive components industry’, ‘to achieve customer service excellence’.

If they are lucky, and remember to communicate this message at least five times, organisations will at least have a chance of employees recalling the statement. But quite often this becomes a mantra, present in the headspace but empty of meaning or action.

The vision, if properly bought in to, will drive behaviour. And changing individual behaviour is the only way we change organisations. Ultimately we need vision statements to be absorbed into the ‘muscle memory’; it needs to be the fuel that drives the engine. Through a somatic connection to the intellectual understanding of the vision statement, a powerful vision statement will drive the right behaviours. It will run like the printing through seaside rock, running right through the individual; part of their core.

By getting employees to hear the message, picture the vision through their own filters and interpretations and feel the connection to its meaning we will tap into a higher level of purpose and this will help to organise beliefs, values and guide behaviours.

Communicating the vision in this way will make the vision come to life in employees across the whole organisation. Then people will live and breathe and behave the vision.

In communicating the vision leaders need to bypass their own filters and get out of their individual ‘maps’ of the world, and second position the employees. Also, by allowing a certain looseness in interpretation of the vision, letting go of control to some extent, employees will synthesise a vision of their own.

Essentially the communication of vision, and the ultimate purpose which is to change behaviour, is purposeless unless that communication has been allowed to be loose enough to pass through the filters of each individual for interpretation and absorption into the somatic/muscle memory.

There are some fun and highly effective ways to do this too. Contact sue@changeworksblog.com to engage in conversation!

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