Vision and Mission Work


As part of the Cooperative Design Lab with The Resilience Hub, Cooperative Development Institute and Cooperative Fermentation, I am giving a workshop tonight on Vision and Mission work for cooperative enterprise tonight. This core values stuff is at the heart of my consulting practice. Today I had an opportunity to review some of the organizational development (OD) literature and I noticed an interesting range of styles and assumptions about leadership in the context of visioning. This post will share some of that as well as a prezi for my workshop.

In Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Bryan Smith has an chapter titled "Building a Shared Vision". In it he explains the developmental stages of an organization facing change and presents the stages in the frame of participation. Within his range of participatory engagement, he suggests that we be objective about where an organization is at, then work up from there. One of the things about vision work with cooperatives is that they are already at the highest developmental stage! According to this model, that stage is labeled co-creating.

Starhawk as a different style than the Fieldbook in general. In her book Empowerment Manual, she offers more cultural variability than the "business-as-usual" approach of mainstream organizational development. Both works in comparison are holistic, however Starhawk's style invites a broader audience than than multinational corporations. Empowerment Manual reflects on a different range of experiences.

Personally, I enjoy her permaculture influence on the OD topics. In preparing for this webinar, I liked that she pulled in Alan Savory's idea of "Holistigoals"! Savory being a worldclass livestock management expert, regenerative systems of land, has a holistic management model that includes three parts of a goal.  These are the following: a.) The quality of life that you want, b.) future resource base, and c.) what you need to produce.You can read about that here and see something about it in my prezi posted below.

For this Co-op Design Lab Vision and Mission workshop, I also drew from Looby Macnamara's book People and Permaculture and Peter Block's work Community: The Structure of Belonging. Finally, I provided the tremendously accessible Vision and Mission Worksheet resource from the creative commons (cc) made available by Craig Von Korlaar.

Here is the presentation. Feel free to share with your organization if you are considering the need for a visioning workshop as a way to establish common understanding in your group.



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