The blog

This autumn I have again had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to work with a group of entre­pre­neurs with­in a project called ​“Spi­ra” (in Eng­lish ​“spire”) here in Gothen­burg. In this project, ten fresh entre­pre­neurs get help build­ing their busi­ness dur­ing six intense months.

My assign­ment was to give a talk and to hold a work­shop on how to for­mu­late a long term vision and how to break it down into short term, detailed goals and mile­stones to guide you on an aver­age work­day. A month lat­er, I met with every indi­vid­ual entre­pre­neur to work on their par­tic­u­lar ques­tions and chal­lenges, regard­ing how to reach your long term goal as eas­i­ly as possible.

When I sat down with illus­tra­tor and design­er Cecil­ia Pet­ters­son, we talked about how to visu­al­ize how far she has come on every­one of her action plans toward her vision. I believe in visu­al­iz­ing these things in a way that fore­most appeals to whom the visu­al­iza­tion is intend­ed for, rather than doing it in ​“the cor­rect way”, accord­ing to the text­book. Then, it is more prob­a­ble that the visu­al­iza­tion is used every day, instead of being put away in a ring binder somewhere.

For some rea­son, we came to talk about her busi­ness’ way toward its vision as a swim­ming pool with a num­ber of lanes, where the lanes rep­re­sent­ed prod­ucts and con­cepts that each and every­one need­ed to reach the full length, all the way into the tile.

About a week ago, I got an e‑mail from Cecilia.

She told me that she had devel­oped the swim­ming pool metaphor even fur­ther and that she had visu­al­ized it in a sketch, that you will find here.

I think it is fab­u­lous. In an easy way, she can see how far in its process every prod­uct con­cept has got­ten, from the first cold call to a poten­tial cus­tomer, all the way to being sold on the open mar­ket. I can eas­i­ly imag­ine the sweet feel­ing of extend­ing the col­ored bar one step to the right, after I have accom­plished yet anoth­er step toward my vision.

What is your way of mea­sur­ing how far you have come on your road ahead? Leave a com­ment below.