Avoid the bland, vague vision statements! Download and use this Future Thank You Speech template instead, to bring out a clearer and more insightful idea of the future you want to see, and your contribution to it.

A lot of offsites and strategy workshops involve getting a group to come up with a vision statement of some sort. But the results are often pretty vague, or sounding stuffed with marketing buzzwords rather than meaningful aspirations.

It really helps to get your group to start by expressing the future they want to see. That’s where the Future Thank You Speech template comes in. This is a fun and insightful way to help people think about the future from a new perspective (i.e. telling a story about it), and to get much more specific about not only their idea of a possible future, but how they might get there.

Each of the prompts on the template are worth having a conversation separately, but they all work together:

• Context - How far into the future are we?
• Achievement - What is it that’s important to you, that you have achieved in this future?
• Contributors - Who would you like to thank?
• Trials - What trials did you overcome along the way?
• Winning move - What was the thing you did differently, that unlocked success? Was there something that everybody thought was crazy, but turned out to be the right call?

This resource contains:

• 1-page Thank You Speech template (PDF)

How to use this resource

You can use and adapt this in different ways. For example, this works as a personal reflection as part of an offsite. or, you can use this as a way of helping each person to process the results of a whole offsite, to tell a story in their words.

• By yourself - Use it as a personal reflection for your life, your work, or how you wold like to lead a team
• Printed out - Give a copy to each person in a meeting or offsite, and ask them to fill it out, as a way of telling a story about a desired future, in their own words
• In an online collaboration space - Create a set of boxes in your favourite online collaboration space using this template as a guide, and then make copies for each person in your group to fill in with their thoughts

Let us run a session for you

Don’t want to run this activity yourself? We can run one for you, on its own or as part of a set of sessions.