by Jack Martin Leith
Intent
Intent is a declaration of how the fruits of the project will enrich the world, or a particular part of it, in a particular way.
Jump ahead and read more about intent
Vision of realised potential
This is a depiction — an actual picture accompanied by a vivid and compelling synopsis — of how the world will look, sound and feel when the person, group or enterprise is fully utilising its value generation capability and generating the foreseen value, meaning and joy without constraint.
Strategy
Strategy can be defined in myriad ways. My preferred definition is the one offered by Richard Rumelt:
Strategy provides a high-level answer to this question:Strategy is […] how you overcome the obstacles that stand between where you are and what you want to achieve.
Source: Why bad strategy is a ‘social contagion’, on McKinsey & Company website.
How can we eliminate the constraints to generating the foreseen value, meaning and joy?
Mission, sub-missions and projects
The strategy is animated by a mission — a programme of work (ideally enterprise-wide) designed to convert the strategy into effective action. Mission is a term is borrowed from the field of space exploration. It is not a synonym for vision or purpose, and it is not about mission statements.
A mission consists of a mission objective and a suite of projects aimed at meeting the objective by a specific date.
Each successive mission has the aim of manifesting intent more fully.
In some cases, the mission will be formed of two or more sub-missions, each composed of a set of projects.
Value generators
An enterprise cannot create value — it can only create value generators.
A value generator is something tangible or intangible that produces experienced value when the user interacts with it, such as a product, service, facility (this website, for instance), event (conference, party, festival), establishment (museum, theatre, restaurant), or artistic work (book, song, piece of music, painting, theatrical production).
Value
Value is tangible or intangible benefit. The three main forms of value are economic value, conceptual value, and experienced value. On this website, I mostly talk about experienced value, which encompasses meaning and joy.
Read more here: Wikipedia: Service-dominant logic and Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing (pdf; 18 pages) by Stephen L. Vargo and Robert F. Lusch.
The academics and value co-creation pioneers Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch use the term appliance in much the same way as I use value generator.
More about intent
Intent is the generative impulse that streams from the unmanifest into the manifest through the gap in time.
Intent has two aspects. One is the originating aspect, which is concerned with initiating new creations. The other is the fulfilling aspect, which is concerned with bringing to fullness that which has been created.
You do not need to believe in the existence of intent. You only need to have faith in its existence.
Faith is a much-abused term, often derided in modern secular circles as the blind obedience to some arbitrary authority. But it has a wiser and more useful meaning: faith as a critical but curious mind’s readiness to adopt a reality model (even if provisionally) for which there is less than absolute, empirical proof. I propose that this kind of faith is the necessary adaptation by any rational mind to the challenges of life in the real world in which reality presents us with far too much, far too quickly. Events, personalities and relationships that carry embedded meaning and value are not the sorts of existents that can pass any rigid absolute-empirical-proof test.
All trust relationships contain a measure of faith. So when the term faith is used in this essay, it refers to reasonable faith, as in the faith that is necessary for a reasonable mind to operate in the real world. Faith in this sense requires courage. Reasonable faith is heuristic in the sense that it is only by means of growing trust that we can open ourselves to the full range of knowledge that the universe presents to us.
There is a faith path from Isaac Newton through Baruch Spinoza to Albert Einstein that has propelled the scientific enterprise: Each of these great minds was moved by the faith-based conviction that the universe has been endowed with an elegant underlying deign, so miraculously intelligible to human intelligence that scientists are justified in doggedly pursuing its secrets.
Jay B. Gaskill, The Dialogic Imperative
Don Juan Matus, the teacher of Carlos Castaneda, describes intent as “the force that creates and animates the universe”. Others use a different name for this force, such as Infinite Intelligence (Napoleon Hill), Creative Energy (Edward Matchett), Holy Spirit (Christians), or the Tao (Taoists).The only valid test of an idea, concept, or theory is what it enables you to do.
DesignShop co-originator Matt Taylor
The label is unimportant because, as it is written in the Tao Te Ching, The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. Whatever we might say it is, it is not that, because it does not ‘exist’ in the realm of things, by which I mean phenomena that can be named, described and categorised.
Intent also refers to how the enterprise, group or member of the laity will enrich the world with value, meaning and joy.
Intent is unrelated to strategic intent (intent precedes strategy; strategy serves intent) and is not the same as intention.
This final image shows how intent enters the manifest realm as an impersonal, pervasive force, and through our faith in its existence becomes a personal force that informs our thinking and guides our moment-by-moment actions.
Continue reading
How to harness Newcreate at work and in your everyday life
How to specify the value your new creation will generate
Intent, the generative impulse — a section of the article Transcend the mundane: what, why and how
Value — what is it and how is it generated?
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