Avanceé.Agency

Musings on designing experiences & (re)engineering complexity

Feb 2018

Looking Beyond the Horizon

Generally, we look towards some unidentifable place beyond the horizon to set a goal. Some call it “moonshot” and others call it just reaching beyond the horizon. This isn’t risky. In fact its more or less the safe thing to do for any team or organization. The challenge therefore is easier to take on because there’s a sense of inevitability to the actions that will happen. If you take the small steps, then what comes next is as normal as the sun going up.

What you don’t often hear about are those groups who focus on something which is well beyond the horizon. Focusing on “effectiveness for tomorrow’s after-lunch meeting.” This seems too direct; too detailed; too finite to stroke the creative impulses where curiosity and purpose make sense of an effort. However, its that detail, that specific “getting ready for the thing you can’t predict” where your impulses thrive. It’s in the “I need to make the 10th person to ask me this better” approach where you start to define the kind of practices and approaches which are truly innovative, and lend into something a bit more immediate than “greater numbers will validate our approach.”

This isn’t normal thinking. For Avanceé, its not simply taking the small steps which makes a big impact possible, but focusing on some (sometimes arbitrary) point in that approachable future where you identify a single detail, a single goal. And from there, you aim for the outcome there and there only. Its a focus not for what is risky or impossible, but for what’s focused enough to incite the kind of creativity which makes for making a better calendar for the moments which will come after.