How to map to the future

Once your future’s envisioned, the harder work begins. Envisioning the future state as powerfully, vividly, viscerally as possible is creative, inspiring fun. (If it’s not, you’re not doing it right!)

This step’s much harder, and comes with a tide of hard questions. The first and hardest is, where are you now, really?

To get to that envisioned, inspiring future, you need a cold hard look at exactly what your present reality is.

That assessment includes (but, as a lawyer would say, “…is not limited to…”) –

• What’s your product and service mix? What do you do now to make enough money to pay the bills?

• What’s your brand, and how’s it doing in the marketplace?

• What are your financial resources and liabilities?

• What’s your current inventory, equipment, licenses, productive capacity…?

• What skills, talents, gifts does your staff currently have – and use?

• How well do they understand how their current roles fit the current reality? How engaged are they?

• What is your competition, and how’s the contest? When they win, how do they win?

With a little imagination, these actually apply to individuals as well as to organizations.

They’re hard questions that need honest answers, and these take a little time and wrestling to realistically assess.

But until you do, you can’t go on – because you can’t build a useful map based on any delusions. You have to know where you are, first, before you set your course to your future.

Next blog post – How to get there, from here...