Your project vision needs to be established through working collaboratively with a diverse group of stakeholders, including people who are connected to the place and understand its distinct local character.
Running a vision workshop
Bringing individuals, agencies, organisations and community members together in an atmosphere of collaboration is important for understanding stakeholder needs, interests and priorities. Collaboration is essential to the development of a collective vision. You will need to hold one or more workshops including the core team as well as movement and place experts and subject matter experts relevant to the project-specific context.
Start with a preliminary vision
Feedback from project teams tells us that a visioning workshop is likely to be more successful if the process starts with the core team presenting a preliminary vision as a starting point, based on the team's analysis of the broader context, rather than starting with a blank sheet. Presenting precedent images that illustrate aspirational ideas for the project can be a highly effective way to communicate the team’s ambitions and to determine whether these ideas are supported by the group.
| Make sure you share the information about the first workshop in plenty of time to allow the participants to do any preparation they may wish to do. |
During the workshop, discuss, validate and confirm which ideas will inform the vision. Consolidate these inputs to identify a shared, place-based (area-specific) vision for the study area.
Consider a set of statements, rather than one
Project teams have found that a successful way to develop and document a shared vision is to work on a set of vision statements. Broad ‘one-statement’ visions can lack sufficient detail, be ambiguous, or can fail to capture different conditions across a study area.
A set of statements that support a wider vision for the study area can better reflect the project's scope. The statements can break the vision down into Built Environment Themes or other objectives relevant to the study area and context. This activity is best done in a participatory workshop environment.
Check with the group
After the vision statements have been drafted and refined, check the results match the group’s expectations. Projects with a smaller scope may be able to do this in the initial workshop, while projects with a larger scope may benefit from doing this in a second workshop. This enables the project team to process the preliminary vision and feedback from the first workshop into an updated vision. A second workshop is an excellent occasion to report back to the group to check the project team is on track, and to confirm to the group their ideas have been heard. A second workshop may also include a review of draft project objectives prepared by the core project team.
| A second workshop is often highly beneficial to complete this exercise. Alternatively, projects that run only one vision workshop can dedicate sufficient time to review the workshop feedback and confirm vision statements with the broader stakeholder group afterwards. |
For further guidance on developing a vision, see Strategic visioning GANSW 2018), have a look at our case studies or get in touch with the Movement and Place Team.
Once the vision statements are agreed upon with the wider group of stakeholders, the next step for the core team is to express the vision as a set of project objectives.