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2015-06-16 06:03:21
Andrew M. Carton
June 12, 2015
When leaders communicate a vision of their organization s future, they tend to emphasize ideals and ideology the importance of success, stewardship, or sustainability. Leaders are likely to emphasize this type of abstract rhetoric more as businesses become increasingly digital. Given that employees within the same organization increasingly possess distinct types of technical knowledge, it may appear that an abstract, general vision is appropriate in order to gain traction and prevent alienating different constituencies.
Yet this type of rhetoric undermines another core objective of vision communication: providing clarity about the future. Leaders must communicate strategies for growth that employees can clearly envision. Instead of invoking abstract ideals, the most effective leaders communicate their visions using image-based words.
What, exactly, is a vision with image-based words? It s one that describes people with well-defined attributes (such as children) and observable actions (such as smiling and laughing). Image-based words convey sensory information to paint a vivid picture of the future, one that employees can easily imagine witnessing. Along these lines, visions with image-based words are more consistent with the literal meaning of the word vision. When leaders include vivid images in their communications, they re transporting employees to the future by telling snippets of a compelling story a story that captures events that have yet to unfold.
Visions with image-based words enhance performance significantly more than visions with abstract statements. Along with Chad Murphy of Oregon State University and Jonathan Clark of Penn State University, I found that hospital leaders who communicated visions with image-based words triggered better patient outcomes than leaders who communicated visions abstractly.
Moreover, in a second study in which teams were tasked with developing a toy prototype, we determined that a vision communicated via image-laden words ( our toys will make wide-eyed kids laugh and proud parents smile ) triggered stronger performance than a vision with similar content but without visual wording ( our toys will be enjoyed by all of our customers ). We found that image-based words have a galvanizing influence they inspire people to work together toward the same crystal-clear snapshot of the future.
Other research has demonstrated the benefits of image-based words. For instance, Purdue University s Cynthia Emrich and her colleagues found that U.S. presidents who used image-based words in their speeches were considered to be more charismatic than those who didn t.
You ve heard image-based phrases: Some of the most inspirational speeches during some of the most critical junctures in history are united by their usage of imagery, from Winston Churchill s snapshot of a future in which the Allied forces would fight in the fields and in the streets to John F. Kennedy s vision of landing a man on the moon to Martin Luther King Jr. s dream in which the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together.
Image-based words have also been used to spark revolutionary moments in business: think of Bill Gates s vision of a world with a computer on every desk and in every home and Henry Ford s dream of a car large enough for the family to enjoy the blessing of hours of pleasure in God s great open spaces. In more recent times, a British chemical engineer named Paul Thomas pronounced a vision that one day we will be able to detect a previously undetectable tumour metabolising inside a human lung simply by asking a patient to breathe into a device.
As Chip and Dan Heath argue in their book Made to Stick, people find concrete messages intuitive because life is concrete. Life involves sights, sounds, and smells, and image-based words provide the best way to approximate this reality through language. My colleagues and I argue that the usefulness of words that mimic reality is especially pronounced when people are thinking about the long-term future because the future is typically so uncertain. Since the future hasn t happened yet, people respond favorably when they hear it described not in terms of abstract aspirations such as maximizing shareholder value or promoting superior customer service, but in terms of what it will look, feel, and sound like.
But people aren t well-equipped to craft vivid messages about the future. Nira Liberman of Tel Aviv University and Yaacov Trope of NYU have found that as we mentally project into the future, we tend to think more abstractly. For example, when people are asked to imagine the action of reading a book, they are more likely to describe it as gaining knowledge than following lines of print if they are asked to imagine doing it next year rather than tomorrow. Due to this tendency, my co-authors and I have found that more than 90% of leaders communicate visions without any image-based words.
When people are encouraged to counter this tendency by communicating more concretely about the distant future, they often set a specific numeric performance target, such as an increase in stock price, market share, or ROI. Of course, this type of quantification is essential for business success. We use data to convert complex phenomena into a more manageable form, compressing the messiness of reality into that which is measurable. We quantify reality in order to track progress. And research on goal setting has established the merits of specific numeric targets for increasing motivation, in large part because they increase clarity about expectations. The importance of quantification has only grown in the digital era.
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Yet image-based words are likely to provide benefits that numeric targets cannot. In other research settings, rhetoric with image-based words has been shown to be superior to rhetoric with numbers in two key ways. Messages laced with data and statistics cannot be easily understood in the absence of stories (which typically have image-based words). And messages with vivid details are also more emotionally riveting than messages with statistics. For instance, Deborah A. Small of Wharton and her colleagues found that a story about a starving 7-year-old girl from Mali prompted people to donate more than twice as much money as a message that food shortages in Malawi are affecting more than three million children in Zambia.
These two principles are likely to translate to vision communication. First, consider comprehensibility. A company s goal of increasing renewable energy usage by 25% requires that people understand the nuances of different forms of renewable energy and how to take stock of current usage. But a vision to create a city with solar panels on every rooftop, biofuel in every car, and wind turbines on every hill is instantly understandable for all recipients regardless of their background or technical expertise.
To illustrate the second principle (emotional impact), consider VisionZero, New York City s goal of reducing annual pedestrian fatalities from 200 to 0. The specificity of this target certainly renders it an effective benchmark. But an image-based vision could capture how life would be different if this goal were achieved, perhaps by referring to how 200 more people a year would have many years left to watch sunsets with their loved ones and laugh with their friends.
Numeric targets pose another problem. Since numbers are more specific than general notions such as maximizing shareholder value, it may be tempting to believe that they would bring to mind other forms of specific thinking, such as mental imagery. Yet contemplating numeric targets is likely to undermine the ability to conjure mental images. To understand why, briefly consider the anatomy of the brain. As explained by Seymour Epstein and his colleagues, we have two cognitive systems one that thinks logically (the analytical system, or our rational self ) and another that encodes sensory information about the external environment (the experiential system, or our mind s eye ). Numbers are processed in the analytical system. They do not trigger the formation of mental images. Alternatively, image-based words are processed in the experiential system. When we read or hear image-based words, they are instantly converted to verbal portraits in our mind s eye.
It is difficult to engage both brain systems at once. When one system is primed, the other tends to lie dormant. Since quantitative information (data, statistics, metrics, and numeric targets) triggers the analytical system, the part of the mind capable of generating a vibrant snapshot of the future shuts off. Quantification is the imagination s mortal enemy.
To convey an inspiring and memorable portrayal of an ideal world not yet realized, leaders should not communicate exclusively with abstract language and numeric targets. They should harness the power of image-based words.
Andrew M. Carton is an assistant professor of management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.