How Visionary Is Your Vision?
As part of a series on Digital Transformation, this article explores a deceptively simple question: how forward leaning is the vision which is guiding your transformation strategy?
Have you considered what your customers will expect from your services in five, ten, or even twenty years’ time? How prepared are you to communicate with them across evolving channels, adapt to new compliance requirements, or harness the right data to anticipate changes in demand? How resilient is your organisation when new challengers emerge? And ultimately—how confident are you in your ability to adapt and survive?
These are not questions you can answer with a roadmap alone. They require a forward-looking vision that creates clarity, alignment, and momentum.
Where do you start?
Having worked with organisations across banking, travel, entertainment, and fundraising, I’ve seen first-hand how frameworks such as the North Star can be highly effective in shaping a vision that is grounded in customer value and future thinking.
The power of the North Star lies in what it allows teams to do: step beyond today’s constraints, distance themselves from familiar objections (“we can’t do that because…”), and focus instead on what could be. It creates the conditions for ambition—while keeping that ambition anchored in reality.
From vision to measurable impact
A vision without a way to measure progress is just aspiration. Once a North Star is defined, the real work begins: identifying the metric that best represents success.
That metric might be customer retention, lifetime value, number of bookings, active feature usage, or percentage of new customers. The specific choice matters less than the discipline behind it. You need to know where you stand today, align future initiatives around improving that metric, and continuously iterate as your understanding evolves.
This is where vision becomes operational.
Pulling the right levers
With a clear metric in place, the focus shifts to leverage. Which levers will move the needle most effectively—technology, people, process, marketing, or organisational design? What should you prioritise first? Which initiatives unlock disproportionate value or enable multiple downstream benefits?
This thinking naturally feeds into your roadmap and highlights gaps in your current portfolio—often revealing opportunities for innovation that wouldn’t otherwise surface.
Why the North Star works
What clients consistently value about the North Star framework is its concreteness. It’s not abstract or theoretical. Stakeholders across the organisation can rally around it. It links directly to corporate strategy, relies on data to drive decisions, exposes weaknesses in transformation plans, and—most importantly—clarifies which levers truly matter.
A well-defined North Star can also scale. Teams can define their own North Stars, provided they directly support and positively influence the overarching organisational one.
In an environment of constant change, vision isn’t about predicting the future perfectly. It’s about creating a shared sense of direction that allows your organisation to move faster, make better decisions, and adapt with confidence.
The question is no longer whether you have a vision—but how visionary it really is.
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