Visualization of corporate goals - does it really work?

We’re all pretty familiar with the concept of visualization as a way to achieve a goal. Most of us have done it in one way or another - whether as simply as sticking a photo of our dream body on the refrigerator to encourage us to choose the carrot over the cheesecake, or picturing that ultimate shot as we prime ourselves to shoot for goal. A friend of mine even started her MBA with a request from her business school to write her own eulogy outlining the outstanding career she was yet to have.

Clearly there’s a benefit that comes from forcing you to articulate your objectives - to make them clear and defined - and many argue that when taken deeper into your subconsciousness, imagining the emotions that will come when you achieve your transformation, visualization can have a life-changing impact (see the impact of Dr Joseph Murphy’s bestseller from 1963, The Power of your Subconscious Mind). (Interestingly this research suggests that the power often comes from visualization of altered behaviors, rather than the achievement of the ultimate goals). 

I was thinking about this late in 2021 when putting down the company goals for LigaData (the mobile operators’ big data company) and thinking of ways to communicate them better to our staff. I recalled Amazon’s technique of writing an internal press release to announce a new product as a mechanism to test and refine the objective for new product development (the Working Backwards approach). This method forces a clear articulation of the proposed product’s features and benefits, its unique positioning in the market and the meaningful impact on customers before anyone has actually built anything, and is a great way to stress-test a product’s viability.

So I experimented with the following idea: How about I write an internal press release describing the goals LigaData achieved over the year? To reinforce - this was me, at the beginning of the year, writing an imaginary press release that could be issued at the end of the year: a draft from the future, looking backward.

This was not just an exercise in forward planning, but rather a mechanism to articulate our corporate priorities, and visualize our achievements by the end of 2022 - including comments from the team and our clients. It was to be a document I could share with the company that was more than just a list of numeric objectives, but that would make these objectives feel real. And most importantly, it would make the achievement of those objectives feel real.

Sounds easy? It was trickier than it seems, but a valuable process to go through.

Tips on writing your internal press release (IPR)

Whether you are running a company, a division, or a team, the following tips might be useful in writing an internal press release.

1. You’re looking backwards. So start with the end of your period - in our case, simply the end of the calendar year. This is important because it binds your objectives to a specific date.
2. Determine your audience. Amazon uses the term ‘internal press release’ (though by definition a press release is generally for wider public consumption). So think about your language and make sure it’s speaking to your audience, whether it's to your employees, your executive team, or your investors. Depending on your audience and culture, make sure you spend time on the context (why a specific goal is important enough to make it to a press release).
3. Start with the bigger picture. If this were a true press release into the public domain then what would investors care most about? How can you build more confidence in the clients you have or the clients who are evaluating you? Make sure you outline the goals most paramount to the company, and the first paragraphs set a context that anyone could understand. 
4. Keep it to one page. Less is more, so really focus on the headline objectives and the benefits to your stakeholders.
5. Be positive. This is supposed to be a tool to inspire, so celebrate the achievements you are going to make - new product released and new customers won. This is probably not the mechanism to declare that you have simply survived another year (however impressive that might be in a pandemic). So think of upward movements rather than pitfalls avoided!
6. Don’t write it in isolation. This is a company statement, so work with your executive/leadership team to identify the key components and to ensure that what’s in the press release is what is genuinely most relevant. Include quotes from real people. For every goal, add a quote from the executive in your organization who owns this objective, such as your CRO for winning new clients. Use the name of the executive for the quote. This instills a sense of ownership and accountability within the rest of the organization. 
7. Make the quote the place to provide context. For example, winning two of the top 10 Mobile Operator Groups is a good goal but it might not mean much to everyone in the company. If you add a quote from your CRO that explains why this goal is paramount to the company, “By winning two of the top mobile operator groups, LigaData demonstrated that its products and services can scale-up to support the largest telco organizations in the world,” then you can explain in an accessible fashion why that achievement is meaningful.
8. Use this as a technique across the business. It need not just be done at C-suite level. It’s a useful exercise for teams of any size to do, ideally in parallel with their own planning for the year ahead. Team heads should share them with their peers, as well as their team members, and headline goals from subsidiary releases can then be rolled up to the company-wide release.
9. Cross-check with your financial objectives. This sounds like a no-brainer but writing this type of release serves as a vital check-and-balance on your financial targets. I put concrete objectives in my version for LigaData with granular numbers, which aligned with our teams’ OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and financial forecasts.
10. Tie your IPR to your goals process. The internal press release is not intended to be a management tool. It is a way to make your company goals more accessible and understood by your audience - and inspire attainment of those goals. So make sure you tie your goals and objectives to the internal press release. 

How successful can this type of corporate visualization be?

Well, time will tell. But for me the very process of drafting the LigaData press release for 2022 forced me to think about validation and prioritization of our objectives. It gave me dedicated time to think about the impact we have on our clients, and what I would like to feel they would say about us as a business, and the value we bring to them. And it resulted in a concise statement that I could share across the business to articulate what we are here for - and hopefully inspire some sense of the pride and ownership we will feel when we deliver against these results (because we will!)

If you’ve used visualization or internal press releases in a similar fashion I’d love to hear from you. Please share your learnings.