What Is VisionBuilding™?

Wildflowers Institute’s VisionBuilding tool is a powerful and compelling cultural discovery process. Corporations, philanthropic organizations, government and civic leaders, and communities worldwide have used this tool to gain insight into internal dynamics, generate vision, enhance strategic planning, and strengthen cultural formation.

VisionBuilding is based on a model-building paradigm. Participants in our workshops – formal and informal leaders in business and the community – work individually and collectively, selecting from hundreds of miniature figurines and other objects and building simple three-dimensional models that clearly express their lens for viewing and working in their organization or community and for seeing their “will.” Personal and group reflection on the models, moderated by licensed VisionBuilding facilitators, uncovers and amplifies deeply held implicit premises about group vision, leadership formation, premises, and practices.

The models are effective because they bypass our usual modes of oral expression and uncover implicit premises or postulates that motivate behavior. The models become a visual language composed of symbols that represent what goes on in an organization or community and what is important to the people. Creating these symbols in a model allows implicit assumptions and patterns to become visible and accessible – not only to the model builder, but also to those who view the model. In this way, the model acts both as mirror from which we can reflect on our own group dynamics more clearly, and as a lens for others to see us and our dynamics more clearly. The immediacy and impact of the model, in combination with verbal narrative and reflection, create a multidimensional visual language that cuts through existing barriers of language and culture to create new wide-bandwidth communication pathways, increased understanding, and alignment.

This powerful visual language allows the most disparate groups to develop and use shared symbols for thoughtful and profound communication that goes beyond the usual meeting format. In workshop sessions, VisionBuilding participants use this new language to develop an individual and collaborative vision that brings life, energy, and consensus to leadership development, identity formation, product and service development, and organizational alignment and effectiveness.

In Wildflowers Institute’s VisionBuilding workshops, leaders transcend the limitations of habitual thinking patterns and see their organizations and communities three- dimensionally, from the inside out ­ the way they really are. Using this insight, they work together to create a visual language that symbolically expresses the dynamics of exponential growth: guiding patterns, identity and meaning, assets and resources, new directions, strategies and processes. …

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