Do You Have a Shared Family Vision?

We all know the story of the local cobbler who was so busy making shoes for his customers that he didn’t have time to make shoes for his family. I swore it wouldn’t happen to us. Our family would have shoes! Over the course of an over thirty year consulting career I have led and participated in hundreds of organizational visioning sessions and, early on, back in 1998 with three young children of our own, it was clear to me that just like my corporate clients, our family needed a shared vision for the future.

I was determined and proclaimed that we would spend New Year’s Eve 1998 together as a family working on our family vision. Under duress my wife and three children amused me and played along. We saved the actual document I used to facilitate our visioning session so that we could revisit it in the future to see how closely we had embodied our shared family vision.

Does your family have a shared vision?

Here is the document I used to get us talking as a family over thirty years ago. Maybe the questions will enable a similar conversation with your family.

Kaplan Family Visioning 12/31/1998

Imagine it is the year 2008. The world survived the dreaded year 2-K disaster and the Kaplan family is thriving in the new millennium. It is hard to imagine that ten years have passed since that…