As an Enterprise Architect one thing I find myself thinking about often is: vision. If it isn’t obvious I mean the kind of vision that relates to seeing into the future—not the kind that relates to my ever increasing reading glasses collection.

Vision—for me—is one of those skills that fit in a special category that most other people I encounter don’t define as skills. I first defined this category while on an Art Foundation course (a year long intensive college course designed to prepare a candidate for applications to art, design, or architecture school) and it was Dave, our life drawing teacher who explained it to me.

Dave explained that it was commonly accepted that art in general—and in this case life drawing—was something that “required talent” to be able to do. He said this had led largely to it being taught in schools by letting people “have a go at it” then telling them what they did wrong when they were finished, I think the premise being that they would uncover talent or just somehow improve.

He had an analogy about teaching somebody to drive with the same method: “Just go around the block Mr Smith and if we make it back here, I’ll let you know what you should have done instead”. His teaching style was the opposite and he would often physically take a student’s hand and guide the pencil, chalk, or charcoal on the paper, he’d get down to look from your viewing position, correct lines, make suggestions.

Side note: he also taught me that it was better to leave a line in place while you “corrected” it otherwise you were likely to repeat the same mistake again—but that is a subject for another time,

I learned more in that single twice weekly class for a year than I have in the previous 4 years of art instruction. I still use the analog of learning to drive in the way we teach some other things and when encountering a new skill that feels ethereal, hard to define, or otherwise whimsical—I now go looking for ways to actively develop that skill.

Skills like being able to see into the future—or vision as it is otherwise known.

When thinking about work, careers, and leadership there are a range of situations that can benefit from good vision, from the most direct: what happens if we do X? to long term, more fuzzy examples: where do we think that the market will be in 1 year’s time when we release this product?

I define “good” vision in two ways, it is either precise: allowing robust plans and dedicated resources to be committed or it is comprehensive: allowing for continuous adjustments to plans based on the actual outcomes. In both cases we can also measure accuracy too ie: good vision is how close did we get to what really happened?

So how do we “learn” vision and how do we practice it?

I want you to imagine you are an author (they say everyone has at least one book in them) and you are pitching a story about the future you are trying to predict and plan for. We do this in 4 steps:

1. Come up with a title.
2. Summarize the events of our story.
3. ‘Pitch’ it to our literary agent or other partner.
4. We compare our story against actual events as they happen.

So you will need a title—something snappy like “How the fabulous tech project turned a corner”, “How the business came back from the brink of bankruptcy”, or perhaps “The great story of my promotion”. The title is important because it starts to define the scope of your story—from an epic about the fate of corporations or markets, to a more intimate personal story about part of a career arc or the fate of a single project.

The scope is important because it sets the level we expect to summarize our story idea. If the scope is epic we might not mention a single character by name—unless it was somebody incredibly influential—whereas if we have an intimate scope it may be nothing but the actions of a single character.

The title may be a goal you want to happen ie: “How the big project was successful” or it may be something you want to predict “How the big project turned out”. In either case the next step is the same.

So now I want you to simply make up a story. You are in total control of what happens, how every character acts, what they do, no matter how fantastical or mundane, you get to decide all of it. The only real “rule” at this stage is that you want to deliver on the promise of the title you came up with ie: the events have to make the title make sense and vice versa.

You can write down bullet points, use your favorite notes app, keep a small summary in your head, or any other method that lets you solidify the high level plot of your story. We aren’t—in any way—looking for a finished piece of writing but instead just a few clear points that could be used to communicate to another person what happens to make the title of your masterpiece true.

You may be tempted at this point—especially if the reason for the vision exercise is planning for a future goal—to audit or check every bullet point as you come up with it. While it would be ideal to have the entire story make sense, our goal at this point is to complete the summary based on our title. Doing this can prevent us from becoming distracted by the details of a small intimate story or too lost in the broadness of a sweeping epic. A complete but imperfect summary is easier to polish than some perfect points of an incomplete story.

So once your summary is complete ie: we know what happens to make the title true we are ready to make our pitch. So before you share your story with co-workers, partners, random people online, or other places…and…you absolutely should, first, or at least once, I’d like you to make an imaginary pitch in your head.

You can make this imaginary pitch to anyone you like, publisher or literary agent, with only a few stipulations: the person in question wants you to be successful (ie: they are on your side), they want you to write a plausible / realistic story, and they have some kind of stake or investment in it and you (ie: they will benefit if you do a good job).

As you picture yourself describing each bullet point, plot twist, or other event in your story I want you to consider what questions this may bring up for the person you are delivering this to. If you are describing the actions of a specific character they may ask “Why would they do that?” to which you may give a confident response like “…because I’ve seen them do that very thing or similar many times before” or the less sure “…because I need them to do that to make my story work out”.

The other person in this exercise is not there to interrogate, belittle, or “question everything for no reason”, rather they care about you enough that they want you to have a successful and reasonable story that makes sense in a broader context (ie: outside of your head). Perhaps they want to help you find supporting evidence like “can you think of any other times where the same thing happened, and how similar was it to this situation?” or “that sounds very plausible, did you do research on that?”

By the end of this part of the exercise you should have either a reasonably well curated story outline or perhaps no matter how helpful you imagined your pitch partner to be you had to abandon your original title.

In the first case you will simply have to wait, or take action if your story was a plan and not a prediction and see how true / accurate your story turned out to be. Once the situation has played out you can see how you did (or you can skip right to the next part if your story did not hold up).

Did the characters act the way you expected them to? If not, can you find potential reasons for the gap in your prediction? Perhaps it was because you haven’t seen enough of their behavior (ie: you just got it wrong). Perhaps there was an external force (known or unknown) that made them behave (literally) “out of character”—a good clue to this is if more than one character in your story appears to be reacting to the same event or situation.

If you are aware of the events that changed the course of your story, were there clues that you missed or otherwise disregard as significant. You can ask yourself, was it predictable at all, and if so, could it have been predicted by you?

Were there events that you (or anyone) were unable to predict—such as a global pandemic, earthquake, or other occurrence? What effect did it have on your story?

More important than attempting to predict these things it is often more useful to just determine what would have happened in your story if some plot point didn’t happen as expected. This is even more important if you were attempting to set a goal rather than just make a prediction—because it makes our vision more adaptable and useful. A real life example might be “Why might ‘team 1’ not deliver their part of the project?” is not as useful as “What do I think happens to the project if ‘team 1’ doesn’t deliver on time?”

No matter how accurate or inaccurate your story is at predicting the future—the next step is the same: you should do it again.

Every part of this technique will improve with practice. More experience of what is and isn’t predictable will improve your ability to come up with a good scope and title. Rigorously assessing your own ideas with your imaginary literary agent or publisher will both help you craft the behavior of other people and it will improve critical thinking skills.

Comparing your predictions with real world outcomes will also sharpen your ability to come up with a reasonable scope as well as helping you determine what research you may or may not need to be sure of the outcome.

So what does any of this have to do with life drawing or my experiences in art school—because you may have predicted we’d get back there right?

A little while ago I decided to come up with a vision of my own. I came up with a story about getting a new job that aligned with my values, would allow me to do my best and highest work, with the skills that I enjoyed using. To do this I’d write articles on LinkedIn, raising both my own profile and those around me, giving possible future employers somewhere to go and learn what kind of employee I may turn out to be. My writing would be honest and approachable and would not only showcase the work of those around me but have interesting anecdotes about my past, such as the fact that I went to art school, or worked as a production lead. The result of this would be that I would get a position I could excel in, both as a leader and an architect.

I have not completed my vision yet so I am not ready for a final assessment but what I can tell you so far is that my publisher (and my wife) said I wasn’t thinking big enough. Both of them have been right—I have learned that I am sometimes surprised when things go better than expected. I will try and integrate that into my future predictions and vision exercises because skills, even seemingly ethereal ones can always be improved.

If you try this technique then please share with me how it goes—we all love a good story after all—or if you are a future potential employer reading this then you should know that I don’t practice life drawing as much as used to but I do a lot of trying to predict the future and you can tell me how well I am doing with it…