Vivid Descriptions

The role of using vivid descriptions to make your company’s BHAG tangible in people’s minds, as discussed in Building Your Company’s Vision, is a very interesting concept to me. I think not only is it extremely relevant and critical to use vivid descriptions when talking about BHAGs but beyond BHAGs I think using vivid descriptions are appropriate in pretty much every other form of communication that a venture carries out.  My view on this has been influenced by several things.  For one it has been shaped by my personal experience reading the HBR Building Your Company’s Vision article.  Without a doubt the vivid descriptions section of this article was the section that was most memorable for me in what was otherwise a rather lengthy (albeit interesting) publication. 

The vivid descriptions included in the HBR article are essentially well crafted stories which are an extremely natural and powerful form of communication for our brains.  Recently a friend shared an article with me on this point entitled ‘Why Sharing Stories Brings People Together’ which essentially emphasizes that when you tell a good story you can control what the audience is thinking.  Here is an idea extracted from the article that I think we can all relate to, “As you relate someone's desires through a story, they become the desires of the audience.  When trouble develops, they gasp in unison, and when desires are fulfilled they smile together.”  Thus in thinking about our venture in the past week and the gaps in our management team it struck me that story telling might be a great way to effectively sell potential business partners and mentors on our idea and get them on board with our line of thinking. 

Of course scripting vivid descriptions and mastering story telling takes time, which is a finite and valuable resource for all organizations.  So naturally this begs the question how do successful organizations decide how many resources it should dedicate to scripting vivid descriptions and (if not for all) for which communications?