Turning Vision into Reality

Montana, Meteors, and Opportunity

Montana, Meteors, and Opportunity

 

 “The great secret of success in life is for a man to be ready when his opportunity comes.” — Benjamin Disraeli, prime minister of England

Too often when success happens, employees ascribe it to “luck.” This is particularly true with regards to the results of planning. Employees assume that somehow a plan is purely deterministic and since you couldn’t have predicted when the happy event happened, it had to be pure chance. 

Strategy is a shared visualization of where the team wants us to be within three to five years. Each day we ask ourselves if what we are doing is consistent with producing that outcome.

With the shared visualization – the picture on the puzzle box – we are prepared to recognize opportunities when they enter our market space. (Note that we don’t predict exactly when and what opportunity, only that over a long enough period of time there will be opportunities.)

With our daily actions we get ourselves prepared to act on those opportunities when they arrive.

By way of illustration, consider how Montana State University and the Boeing Corporation solved an impossible communications problem in 1968. In an era before ubiquitous communications satellites, how do you communicate over the horizon between two locations that are not within line of sight? You need something reliable to “bounce” radio signals off of. Electrons in ionized gas will in effect create a mirror in the sky that you can use to bounce the radio signal. When meteors enter earth’s atmosphere and vaporize, they create such an ionized vapor trail.

The engineers at MSU and Boeing developed a system that could provide reliable communications 24 hours a day via meteor trails. On the surface this appears absurd. “How can you predict exactly when a meteor will enter earth’s atmosphere?” The answer is – you can’t. What you can predict is that over a reasonable period of time there will be enough meteors entering our space to get the job done. That is, as long as we have the capability to quickly recognize when a meteor enters our space and have prepared a system to capitalize on that entry.

We live in a wonderful country where opportunities are constantly entering our market space. While we can’t exactly predict when and what those opportunities will be, we can prepare ourselves to be able to recognize and quickly act on them. Preparation starts with deciding and defining a vision of your future with your team. I continue to believe that the strategic planning process is the most effective way to create that vision along with the action plans to support that vision.

 

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