Is your vision for success demotivating you?

Many leaders I hear from feel they've made a prison for themselves out of what used to be something fun and exciting. For these people, having a vision of success that they're working towards feels less motivational and more like a straitjacket.

For the 10 years that I ran my digital agency, my co-founder and I tried 4 or 5 times to create a lasting vision for the business. It's a common strategic exercise: "Where will we be in 5 years?"

But each time we'd revisit it a year or so later, shamefully acknowledging we'd made little progress.

Counterintuitively, it was like having a vision in place actually demotivated us. Sometimes it made us see how far away and out of reach that vision seemed, other times it felt too achievable and made us complacent.

Either way, having the vision written down seemed to backfire and made us reluctant to actually work on it. Turns out, we weren't alone.

In an ingenious experiment, Gabriele Oettingen compared the effect of 'positive fantasies' on a group of people. Mildly dehydrated participants were split into two groups - one group were asked to visualise drinking a refreshing glass of water, and the other were asked to complete a different task. The energy levels of both groups were then measured.

The group with a vision had a significant lack of energy compared to the second group.

This runs counter to what we might assume - surely the first group's visualisation would get them motivated and energised to seek out that glass of water? But several follow up variations of the study compounded the findings. This lead Oettingen to conclude that these kinds of positive fantasies lead to poor performance because they do not create motivation to pursue the desired future - precisely the thing we employ visions to do.

There is also evidence that creating and sticking to a plan too rigidly makes us less adaptable to new information, even if it clearly contradicts the assumptions of our plan. And even the act of making and sticking to a plan at all can make us more likely to miss better opportunities, especially when we are under time constraints.

So if visions demotivate us, why does not having one make me feel adrift?

As an entrepreneur I can sometimes feel like I'm tackling every week as it comes, each one different to the last, and I'm not seeing how they all fit together into a larger destination.

It makes me think of the RPGs I used to play as a kid - where you'd start the game in a dark environment, not being able to see what's around you. As you moved around the space, you 'lit up' parts of your map, meaning that as you explored you gradually uncovered your surroundings as you went.

In these games, there is a fuzzy goal at work from the first level. Fuzzy goals are ones that provide a general direction, without a specific plan: Solve the mystery. Save the princess. Defeat the monster.

In the game context, it's up to the player to figure out the shape and size of that goal, and how they might go about finding resources and skills to achieve it. Whereas visions lay out a place we're trying to arrive at, a fuzzy goal acts as a direction that orients us.

The method to achieve the goal becomes clearer and more defined over time: Solve the mystery by piecing together clues. Save the princess by finding her in the castle and setting her free. Defeat the monster by chopping off its head with the ancient sword.

In a business context, this feels closer to Krumboltz' Planned Happenstance theory: that success isn't achieved by comprehensive planning, but by embracing opportunity and adapting to new information as you go. Similarly, rather than being defined up front and measured against agreed milestones, fuzzy goals are held loosely and adapt over time.

For Big Echo, my fuzzy goal is to "help small organisations validate and implement tech ideas."

This fuzzy goal gives me direction and helps make decisions, without being so clearly defined that it demotivates me.

Just recently, I used this fuzzy goal to define the shape of a new Big Echo idea. I knew I wanted to build a community for leaders with a regular, structured, low commitment meet up. But my fuzzy goal meant the idea needed to actually add value and help people, not just be a networking event. (More on that soon!)

It's the light that helps me explore the dark and make meaningful progress, without being too prescriptive so as to take all the fun out of it.

Without a specific destination in mind, how would you describe the direction you want to head in?