An overarching vision is critical to guiding and keeping a business on track with where it wants or is aiming to be in the future.
However, at various points, the future needs to be shortened down to a horizon which is clearly within reach. I refer to these points in the journey as target visions.
Target visions are points along the journey which give an indication of progress and hopefully incentive to show that the longterm vision is POSSIBLE!
So within the Australian Cricket team, there was an air of confidence, delicately balanced between arrogance and total belief in our abilities to dominate our opposition.
It became important to devise a target visionso that, in some regard, the opposition was no longer the game – the opposition was ourselves. How far could we push ourselves? How far did we want to push ourselves? How much did we still want to continue the journey to Everest and The Invincibles?
I decided that one of our teams, the One Day International (ODI) team should chase the target vision of being the first international team to score 400 runs in a batting innings!
The video gives some insights to how this was done, and what was achieved……………………
WHY was it possible to challenge the team in this way?
Some very important reasons –
- We had been operating for a number of years in a High Performance environment which meant everything was up for challenge. Just because no team had achieved 400, almost made it a ‘given’ that we should be the first team to actively seek to do it.
- There was little doubt in my mind that the target vision could be achieved, and even less doubt in my mind that we had the skills to achieve such a result.
- Individual and team egos were carefully challenged to help fuel the fire of setting a new world benchmark
- As coach, and a believer in ‘if better is possible, then good is not good enough’, I found ways through data, evidence, persuasion, training, outside experts to overcome resistance to the target vision.
When Neil Armstrong put his left boot on the surface at 2:56 UTC July 21, 1969, then spoke the famous words “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”. He was there because of the Vision of NASA, and their space exploration quest. While much lesser in significance, the Australian Cricket team’s 400 vision was achieved through similar principles.
