Starting To Think In Terms Of "Vision" Once Again

At one point early last year, I played a part, along with a few others, in making certain Agile terms rather unpopular at work. It wasn't intentional, but it happened regardless. We who had immersed ourselves in Agile concepts, while the rest of the company was still beavering away in a Waterfall process, got rather caught up in the moment and started behaving and talking somewhat... shall we say, evangelically? By that point we were thinking in terms of philosophy and life cycles, rather than the more pragmatic concerns of going to Agile (which we'd considered and moved past earlier). And because we were talking all this trash to a bunch a people who initially couldn't have cared less about Agile, and then increasingly became interested in it but moreso from a "what does this mean to me?" perspective, we were delivering the wrong message at the wrong time. And hence the more-or-less negative connotations that arose around some of the terminology.

So in the course of this, one of the words we sullied - and did I mention this was unintentional? well it was! - turned out to be "Vision" (and "Envision" and "Envisioning" and who knows, maybe even "Visionary" and "Television", for all I know!) Ever the diplomat - and by the way, I'll pause here to allow for a short period of laughter - I decided on the tactic of avoiding those terms for awhile, in order to hopefully let them live again in the future, and to, well, stop pissing people off quite so much.

But lately I've been using the word "Vision" a little more. One place I've found it particularly useful is in the consideration of problem situations that don't seem obvious in their solution. A blog post for another day concerns my revelation last year that most of my problem solving seems to happen in milliseconds within my brain, because the problem and its solution often occur to me virtually simultaneously. Here, however, I'm talking about larger issues that require contemplation, and discussion, and refinement, and so on.

With one of those before me, I've started focusing less on how to fix it, initially, and more on imagining (or, if I may, envisioning) what the eventual fixed state would look like. Some people may already problem-solve this way, in which case they'd be hitting their forehead and uttering "Duh!" right about now, but it's not a trick I'd ever consciously relied on before. It's come in handy several times over the past couple months, and I'm now starting to think to do it sooner, rather than later (when I'm stuck).

As you'd imagine, the next step in getting from "Vision" to "Reality" is trying to figure out what first steps you'd take, and possibly what obstacles you're up against. And that fits the Agile model very nicely, which is a good thing!

"And that's all I have to say about that!"
- Tom Hanks, Forrest Gump