Envisioning Journeys
“All journeys of human transformation begin from re-envisioning one’s own destiny.”
Before an institution can change how it works, the people inside it have to see a different future for themselves. It cannot be a future announced from the top. Each person has to arrive at it and recognise it as their own. Srinivas calls this “the collective act of individualised seeing”, and envisioning journeys are how he puts it into practice.
Two spaces at once
An envisioning journey works in two spaces at once. In the individual space, people re-see their role and what they can contribute through it, their identity and self-esteem, and their capacity to deliver. In the institutional space, the organisation re-sees its business model, its delivery systems and how it serves the people it exists for. The collective is where the two meet: where individuals and the institution negotiate between structure and freedom, performance and discovery.
Four stages
The journey moves through four stages: envisioning; specifying the models and ways of working that make the vision workable; diffusing it across the institution; and embedding it in everyday practice, so that it is lived rather than complied with.
Journeys led
Srinivas has led envisioning journeys with more than 30 institutions and communities. Among them:
- Bharat Petroleum (from 2004): top management envisioned a new model for the company’s fuel retail business, set out in Designing for a Knowledge Service Enterprise (2005). The journey went on to reach more than 100,000 forecourt attendants, recast dealers as counsellors to their customers rather than managers of fuel depots, and led dealers to run free health camps for about a million long-distance truck drivers.
- State Bank of India (2007–08): envisioning with top management and customer-facing teams produced the ideal of “Citizen SBI: banker to the nation”, set out in Citizenship: A Vision Document (2008) and carried to 200,000 employees in 14 languages.
- Tata Consultancy Services (BPS division) and the Shapoorji Pallonji Group: about 80,000 people each, arriving at their own ideals, “Collective Contribution” and “Sustainable Evolution of the Institution”.
- A Change Lab on child malnutrition in Maharashtra (2006): government, civil society and business envisioned solutions together, which were then built into intervention models.
- Rural women and nutrition, Uttar Pradesh, with the Ramakrishna Mission Home of Service, Varanasi: Illumine designed the methodology for a nutrition education programme funded by the World Health Organization, applied with thousands of women across the state. Village women who saw themselves as uneducated, and unable to understand nutrition, came to see themselves as “Durga-Lakshmi-Saraswati”: protectors of their families’ health, prosperity and education. The work showed how a shift in identity sustains a change in behaviour.
- Caritas Luxembourg (Luxembourg, October 2013): a two-day envisioning workshop led by Srinivas with the organisation’s team. Together they mapped their critical concerns, set the criteria for a successful engagement with communities and with partners, and agreed a new, purpose-driven model. It separates “depth engagements”, driven by purpose and contribution, in which Caritas acts as a change-maker, from “functional engagements”, in which it acts as a funder, with a roadmap for reorganising the teams around that distinction.
- Young career-seekers across India (2004–06): careers reframed as spaces for contribution, with an enabling identity people could grow into over time.
Read
- The Collective Act of Individualised Seeing2004Why a vision can’t be handed down, only owned: seven short insights on how each person comes to see the same emerging whole for themselves.
- Rigorous Envisioning2005A five-stage method for envisioning, from mapping a community’s concerns and defining its measures to describing the world it wants to bring into being.
- Collective Aspiration2005Why the gap between an organisation’s words and its actions comes down to aspiration, and why a group’s shared aspiration is the real measure of its fulfilment.
- Rigorous Envisioning with Caritas Luxembourg, an Illumine Lab report2013How a two-day envisioning process helped an international NGO separate its work as a funder from its work as a change-maker, and reorganise around that distinction.