A Step-By-Step Guide in How to Fail At Casting Your Vision
A Step-By-Step Guide in How to Fail At Casting Your Vision
And one simple way to get it right.
This issue is brought to you by Visionary Stewardship, one of the 5 categories of future fluency.
My biggest challenge in transitioning into being a co-founder has been balancing being heads down with being heads up.
I do a lot of heads down tactical work right now.
Maybe it’s the nature of being the technical co-founder of a software platform.
Plumb1 is still a few features away from being absolute magic enabling anyone to automate their work.
But what I noticed this week—after conversations with some of my team—was that our team wants to hear more from me and my co-founder, Aaron Dignan, about our vision.
How To Fail
The step-by-step guide on how to fail at casting vision is an easy mixture of 3 ingredients done over time:
Don’t communicate with your team
Don't check if they have what they need
Do as much tactical work as you can
The longer you mix these 3 ingredients, the more you’ll fail.
And I think this is the most important noticing I’ve had in my brief stint of being in a founder role.
How To Flourish
As I thought about how I’ve failed to cast vision this week, it led me to revisit the book Brave New Work (written by Aaron, my co-founder), specifically the section on Purpose.
Two quotes stood out to me:
Evolutionary Organizations aspire to eudaemonic purpose—missions that enable human flourishing.
and
Profit is the critically important fuel that powers our purpose.
The two most important parts of any organization are that the mission enable human flourishing and profitability fuels that purpose.
I also recently read The Motive and this quote about why CEOs communicate stood out to me:
The reason a CEO communicates to employees, at all levels, is to ensure that people are aligned with and have bought into what is going on and where they fit into the success of the enterprise.
If you take these 3 thoughts together, there’s a clearly actionable responsibility of a co-founder that I haven’t been doing:
A Founder/Executive should constantly communicate the shared mission that enables human flourishing and find ways to make it profitable to further that mission.
I think this is the most important responsibility of any visionary or executive.
It should probably be plastered on my wall somewhere.
It’s the responsibility of the person casting the vision to cast the vision to the point that the team is sick of hearing about it. It’s better for them to be sick of hearing about it than to not hear about it at all.
This is my big thought from this week: If you hold an executive role, your primary responsibility is to continually communicate the mission widely and make sure that your team is doing the right things based on the mission.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t or shouldn’t do tactical work.
Another part of being a leader on a small team is demonstrating how to do the work.
In my case, that means creating magic through code.
It’s all very simple really, but…it’s also very hard.
A Quick Gratitude
I’m grateful to be on this team with Aaron as a co-founder.
I've found a group of people who are open about their experiences with me and willing to share their needs.
The best thing I can do for them is to continually point at the horizon we’re moving towards, to share why I think moving towards that horizon is the most important thing and how moving towards that horizon helps our mission.
If you’re in a leadership role, I hope you can find as good a partner and team as I’ve been lucky to find. We’re creating magic.
🚀 3-2-1 Lift Off!
People ask me for recommendations of things often. Usually it’s things I’m learning, tools or frameworks I’m using or ways I’m working.
As a result, I’m bringing back the 3-2-1 model I was using when I first started writing:
3 Essential Reads
2 Practical Tools & Tips
1 AI Prompt (this one is new, but I think you’ll like it)
3 Essential Reads
📚 Brave New Work is a guide to transforming your organization into an evolutionary organization written by Aaron Dignan. Most of what I know and believe about how organizations should operate is based on this book.
📚 The Motive is a business fable by Patrick Lencioni, geared towards helping leaders understand the “why?” of their leadership. It’s helped me to move towards being a better leader at Plumb.
📝 Future Fluency: 10 Skills & Mindsets For Pulling The Future Into The Present is an article I wrote about the key traits of future fluent individuals who thrive in our rapidly changing world.
2 Practical Tools & Tips
I use Loom multiple times a day to document work I’ve done, ideas I have and walkthroughs. Loom is one of the most important tools in my digital tool stack.
I recently wrote about 2x2 charts, which are great tools for making decisions and visualizing constraints.
If you’d be interested in me deep diving Loom or 2x2 charts for decision making and idea exploration, send me an email and let me know or leave me a comment below about which you’d like to learn more about!
1 AI Prompt
AI, specifically Claude, has started to become a big part of my digital tool stack as well. I use it heavily as a collaborator for refining my ideas.
This week, the prompt is a short prompt I use to guide my writing process (shout out to Pat Morgan for the inspiration).
I'm writing a blog post for [INSERT YOUR TOPIC]
I'd like you to ask me questions (1 at a time) to help me get the content for this post on paper.
The goal of this blog post is to [EDUCATE|CONVINCE|ENTERTAIN, choose one] a [SPECIFIC USER TYPE] user on [WHAT THEY SHOULD WALK AWAY WITH].
For example:
I'm writing a blog post for "Setting up Rapid Logging for Obsidian on iOS and MacOS"
I'd like you to ask me questions (1 at a time) to help me get the content for this post on paper.
The goal of this blog post is to educate a Mac based Obsidian user on how to setup rapid logging.
Here’s a 2 minute walkthrough on Loom (oh, is that one of my practical tools?! 😉) of how I use this AI assistant prompt and why I think it’s useful.
An Invitation to Connect
If you found value in this issue, particularly in the tools and ideas shared, I'd love to hear from you:
Deep Dive Interests: Are you curious about Loom or 2x2 charts for decision making? Drop me an email or leave a comment below to let me know which topic you'd like explored further in upcoming issues.
Share With Another Visionary: Know someone who might benefit from these insights on future fluency and visionary leadership? Forward this newsletter to a friend or colleague. Let's grow this community of forward-thinkers together.
Let's Connect: Your thoughts and experiences matter to me. Whether it's about the AI prompt, the leadership insights, or anything else that resonated with you, I'm always eager to engage in meaningful conversations. Reach out anytime!
Remember, the future is not just something that happens to us, it's something we can actively shape.
By staying fluent in the skills and mindsets of tomorrow, we're better equipped to pull the future we want into the present.
Until next time, stay curious!
[[Chase]]
Plumb is a platform to give everyone the power to easily automate their work—as they see fit—with the power of AI.