Teamwork Exercise: Developing a Clear and Elevating Goal (Vision)

Exercise Purpose

The development of a shared vision that describes your team’s preferred future is an essential step in the collaborative process. Your vision will provide you and your colleagues with direction and motivation, and inspire you to commit your time, energy, and resources to accomplish the many tasks ahead.

Exercise Instructions

Individually, please record your thoughts about and responses to the following questions:

• If our collaborative project or endeavor was working ideally, what would it look like?
• To what end are we striving? What, ultimately, do we want to achieve as a collaborative team?
• If we successfully address the criminal justice problem or issue upon which we are focusing, what will our community or our jurisdiction look like?

As you consider these questions, try to avoid focusing on the current situation and the limitations associated with it. Think “big” and articulate a “pie in the sky” destination for your team. Visioning is not about articulating every problem and every task associated with your work; rather, it is a discussion of where you ultimately want to go.

• Go around your group and have each person read one of their responses to the questions above. Record these on a flipchart. Continue to make your way around the group until all answers have been captured.
• Work to synthesize and distill the key messages on the flipchart into a statement that describes your team’s lofty and compelling vision of the future.

Many collaborative teams have found it to be very useful to return to their vision statement periodically to make sure that it still resonates fully with members and to remind themselves of the importance of their work together.