The vision conversation: our sync-async process for impactful decision making

Decision making can be challenging in an ever evolving and creative organization. Transparency and clarity are key when it comes to getting everyone in the organization on the same page – and keeping them there. That’s why we have a process called the vision conversation at Voys, a meeting which colleagues can request when they feel the need to create clarity around a big topic that impacts our organization as a whole.

In this article I’ll tell you a bit more about how the vision conversation works and what we’ve gained from using this process. I’ve included an example of a vision conversation and I’ll share some details about how this process works remotely.

Our decision making process needed a new approach

Working remotely has never been an issue at Voys. Colleagues work from home or plan a workation without any problems. But in 2020, when Covid hit, even we were faced with the challenge of working completely remote.

At the time I was in Australia, which has a +8 hour time difference from the Netherlands. So the different time zones added an extra challenge. There was only a small overlap in working hours with my colleagues, which made it very difficult for a group of people to come together at the same time.

Though we soon figured out how we could work together in this new setting where suddenly all colleagues worked remotely, facilitating vision conversations asked for us to take it up a notch. It became very clear: we needed a completely different approach to the vision conversation process. That’s why we decided to update the process and turn it into an async-first process, with a synchronized meet in the middle.

The need for a vision: issues in a practical work situation

My first vision conversation was about privacy. While Voys went the extra mile when it came to that topic, we never formulated a consistent vision on it for developing our product. We felt the need to create an aligned vision here. Not just for developing our products, but also in communicating about it to our customers, since they deserve to know exactly how we work and what that means for their privacy. So the topic of privacy was an overarching theme that needed to be discussed in a vision conversation.

The need for a vision conversation actually emerged because of a super practical situation on the workfloor. We started developing our new communication platform – which we call Holodeck. Holodeck would be built on a new technological stack. It would have a different feature set than our current product and therefore it needed to run on a different hosting platform. This would encompass features we never had in our current product.

But during that process we got stuck during ideation sessions.

With every idea we had, there would always be someone asking: ‘Should we even try this? It might seem privacy-unfriendly to our users.’ The question in itself was very valid, because privacy is a hard demand for every product we design, but because a clear vision was lacking, we had to ask ourselves this question over and over again. This was slowing our development process down.

One of my colleagues then requested a vision conversation to get clarity on the topic of privacy. Because we needed that clarity to perform our daily work on the level that we aspire.

Involving the organization in big impactful decisions

Vision conversations are used to create clarity around big topics. They are always about overarching themes that affect the whole organization. The process is designed to zoom out and see the bigger picture. For that we use input from the entire group instead of one person to come to clarity and a formulated vision that works for everyone involved.

All colleagues are welcome to contribute to the vision conversation since the outcomes will affect their work one way or another. Of course participating is never mandatory. Therefore the vision conversation takes place with colleagues that feel involved. Every participant cares about the topic and the influence it has on the organization.

The process of the vision conversation in four simple steps

Creating clarity shouldn’t take ages. That’s why we created a compact process which is efficient but leaves enough room for people to be heard. It’s boiled down to as following:

• Intake: your tension gets vetted by the facilitator because it’s important to make your personal opinions subservient to the organization’s interests.
• Preparation: a survey goes out to all participants with relevant questions on the topic, to get the participants’ initial thoughts on it without it being influenced by others.
• The conversation: the conversation itself has a fixed structure which is followed by the facilitator: explainer, check-in, introduction, clarifying questions, point-of-view round and deep dive.
• Aftercare: sometimes the conversation doesn’t end there or there are some next actions to be followed up on. Or we might need another round of clarifications via surveys and async conversations in Slack, our main communication tool.

Are you curious to learn more about the process? The Voys Handbook offers you an in-depth look at the process of the vision conversations.

The vision conversation in practice

So, let me take you back to the vision conversation we had on privacy, because it is a great example of how the process works.

The first step after being granted a vision conversation is sending out a survey. We do this before we meet in person so everyone gets a chance to express their opinions and ideas freely without being influenced by colleagues. This step works perfectly async, which gives it even more added value. People have the space and time to think about their answers, which is also a big plus. When everyone has filled out the questionnaire, we’re allowed to see each other’s answers.

For the vision conversation about privacy we formulated the following questions:

• What is our goal concerning privacy?
• Do we want to comply with the law or do we want to go the extra mile?
• How much impact may privacy have on our product on ease of use, development speed and cost?
• Ease of use: how easy is it for our users to use our products?
• Development speed: how much can a feature slow us down?
• Cost: how much are we willing to pay for privacy?

The next step was to have an online meeting with all participants. This is the actual vision conversation, hosted by a facilitator. Due to the tight structure of this meeting everyone gets heard and is able to get their point across.

During the conversation, after some initial discussions, I noticed that we were all kind of agreeing but in different ways and there was a lot of overlap in the broadest sense. Yet we couldn’t get to one conclusion on the details. Every time someone would emphasize one impactful aspect, someone else would counter in a slightly different way.

Using an algorithm to get unstuck

We somehow needed to come up with a way to quantify how important privacy was for each individual, while at the same time showing where the differences and overlap between each individual were.

We used a simple but effective method to score the importance of each topic with points. We created a Google Sheet with three columns: ease of use, development speed and cost.

Each of us would write down a number from 0-10, where 0 stands for ‘it cannot have any impact’ and 10 being ‘it can have all the impact’.

This was the result:

This little exercise helped us quantify our arguments and see how the other colleagues looked at the issue. We then proceeded to discuss the findings and agree on what we were seeing pretty quickly since we had a more tangible concept of each person’s view on the topic.

This algorithmic method has another huge advantage, we can repeat it with a different set of colleagues giving us a better view over a bigger group of people.

Documenting every step of the process

The entire process of the vision conversation is documented extensively and transcribed in our Notion database Vision Conversations. The decisions are registered in the Decision database. Some pages contain up to 8-10 subpages and artifacts.

Having this ‘paper trail’ of our reasoning and our conversations makes it easy to come back to it later and understand how and why we chose the outcome we did.
This can greatly improve a follow-up decision we make because now we know why we chose option A 5 years ago and incorporate everything we’ve learned along the way into the new decision. That’s why we documented that as well, we can see how this then improves decisions 10 years down the line.

Although the outcome itself is not very important for this blog post, it’s illustrative of what kind of clarity can be achieved through this process. So here’s what we came up with during the privacy vision conversation.

As an organization that finds privacy very important:

• We’ll put a lot of effort and care into making sure that using privacy-focused features won’t hinder our users’ experience.
• We don’t mind going slower with our development to offer better privacy. Which is visible in our current AI features and approach.
• We’ll always choose privacy over profits. We don’t mind spending cash to be more privacy-aware. For example dedicated servers versus shared ones. This choice is visible in our strategy of owning most of our infrastructure and code.

What I’ve learned from the vision conversation

When you read the whole process a vision conversation can come across a bit daunting, but the truth is that going through the process actually delivers incredible value to the organization and is worth the time and effort.

This is what I learned so far from having vision conversations:

• Having clear, structured decision processes in place helps a lot with making big decisions.
• Having asynchronous steps in the process gives people the time to reason about it when they have the space. It also catalyzes the decision a lot.
• Having a synchronized discussion helps understand small nuances and minor misalignments better after the asynchronous input.
• During the synced step, you’ll get the chance to adapt the process on the fly to get unstuck.
• Try using more algorithms for getting alignment and insight into each other’s perception.
• There are loads more applications for this method such as hiring, strategic, and prioritization challenges.
• Documenting every stage is very important for posterity and future understanding of ‘the why’.

Do you involve colleagues in making big decisions?

As you’ve seen, having a strong synced-async decision-making process helped us to create clarity on big topics in a more robust and repeatable way than just a synced or async decision process could have done.

Combining sync and async in decision-making has proved to be a winning combination, which I feel should be done more intentionally and more often. No hype has ever pickup up steam without a catchy term, so let me coin the term ‘Synced-Async decision making’ 😃

I’m curious to know: how do you involve others in creating a vision on important themes within your organization? Let me know on LinkedIn!