Shared Vision: Beyond the Workshop

Over the last few weeks, I've been reflecting on shared vision for the team after a coaching session with a recently promoted engineering SVP. She described a recurring pattern: her engineering team kept having the same conversations with other departments about priorities and timelines, but nothing changed.

"Do you have a shared vision for your team?" I asked.

She paused. "We have the company vision statement. But if you asked my engineers what we're optimizing for, then asked sales or product the same question, you'd get completely different answers."

Company statement on the wall. No shared vision in the room. So what's out there to help?

Image from a community workshop by Igor Gorlatov at Hygge Coworking in 2024

What Sticks vs What Matters

When I started researching shared vision, I noticed a pattern in what we remember versus what's actually there. Things we remember:

  • How to wordsmith the perfect vision statement

  • How to communicate vision effectively

  • Why you should "start with your why"

Most of this work has real depth. But we extract what's actionable—wordsmith the statement, run the workshop, communicate the vision—and leave behind the harder parts about culture, relationships, and how teams actually work together.

In my experience working with leadership teams, vision doesn't live in statements or slides. It lives in people.

The best thinking on this is actually 30 years old.

What Senge Got Right 

The person who dug deepest into this was Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline back in the early 1990s. I haven't found anyone substantially advancing his core insights:

  1. Personal vision must precede shared vision — You can't skip to collective clarity without individual clarity first

  2. Shared vision is holographic — Adding people doesn't divide it; their buy-in intensifies it

  3. Vision emerges from genuine caring, not workshops — It's discovered and crystallized, not manufactured

  4. Vision creates generative learning, not just adaptive learning — It expands what's possible, not just solves current problems

Vision emerges from genuine caring, not workshops.
— Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

True shared vision is emotional, energizing, and lives beyond concepts.

I saw this with a client team last year—an InfoSec group at a high-growth SaaS company. I wasn't there when they created their vision; I came in to facilitate an offsite. But within minutes, I could feel it. The vision to "be the best security team in the industry" wasn't on a poster—it was in how people showed up.

Team members had built internal tools on their own time. People were skipping certification levels to tackle harder ones. The leader and his top three lieutenants had worked together at previous companies. The shared vision lived in their relationships first, then spread to the wider team.

When vision is genuine, it doesn't need constant maintenance. It pulls people toward it. That InfoSec team proves something many leaders get backwards.

The Category Error 

Popular leadership literature presents vision as input: create the vision, behavior follows. But it's more complex.

Each person needs personal vision first. Shared vision emerges when people with individual clarity discover what they genuinely care about collectively. Workshops can create space for that alignment work—if done well.

Then comes the test: when vision encounters reality, how much pull does it generate? Strong vision moves teams through constraints. Weak vision collapses at the first obstacle.

Strong vision moves teams through constraints. Weak vision collapses at the first obstacle.
— Igor Gorlatov

My Advisory5 group illustrates this. Clear vision, people bought in, doing the work together. Strong enough to attract advisors and startups who volunteer time. Not yet strong enough to pull in institutional partners—health systems, innovation districts. That gap shows where the vision needs brightening.

Vision isn't input or output—it's creative tension between what we want and what's possible. The question: does it generate enough pull to move your team through actual constraints? That pull comes from the relationships and culture underneath, not from the statement on the wall.

When Workshops Backfire

Vision workshops can create valuable space for alignment. But they often become something else: exercises in manufacturing consent.

The stated purpose: "What do we want to create together?" The actual process: "How do we get people to buy into what leadership already decided?"

When a workshop is designed to produce a predetermined outcome, people sense it. They participate, they nod, they even get energized for a couple weeks. Then they drift back to how things actually work, more cynical than before.

The difference is what you're willing to invest. Most leaders default to what's quick: run the workshop, create alignment, move on. It's efficient and understandable. But it produces weak vision. Stronger vision requires more: create space for people to surface what they actually care about, stay in the discomfort when perspectives conflict, be willing to reshape the vision based on what you hear. It's slower and messier. But that's what creates the pull - vision strong enough to actually move a team through real constraints.

Which raises the harder question.

So Where Does It Actually Begin?

With a culture that respects both people and results—not people as parts, but as unique contributors.

See people's uniqueness. The chances of two people having the same top five strengths in the same order: about 1 in 33 million. When leaders notice what each person distinctly does well, people understand how they uniquely contribute. Not through assessments—through ongoing attention.

Learn what they care about. Ask directly: What do you want to make better? What impact matters to you? Regular conversations, not workshops. When people connect their work to something they genuinely care about, individual vision starts.

Collect stories of impact. Ask: "When did you see your work matter this week?" Share those stories. Over time, the pattern of what you're building together becomes visible.

Shared vision emerges from this foundation: people who know their unique contribution, understand what they care about, and see their impact.

The Bottom Line

My engineering SVP is still deciding. When I suggested facilitating this conversation at their executive offsite, she went quiet. "That feels like a heart attack."

It is hard. Getting clear on shared vision—what you're building, why it matters, how each person contributes—should be simple, but it's not. The teams that do this work stop talking past each other and start pulling together.

The question isn't whether it's uncomfortable. It's whether you're ready to do it anyway.

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