Yesterday I facilitated a powerful session on Moonshot: The Desirable Dream to one of our Dream See Do client partners. They are an organization who are doing great work in the field of neurodiversity which makes it me even more excited to work with them. I was super stoked to facilitate this re-imagining of what is possible for their curriculum, online learning academy and online community.
In the session, I made use of one of the tools in the Community Builder: Designing Communities for Change toolkit .
The Moonshot is a tool that helps to re-imagine what is possible. Moonshot according to Oxford Dictionary is
An extremely ambitious and innovative project.
The term moonshot originated from the Apollo and Soviet lunar programmes aiming to land humans on the moon. In business settings, a moonshot takes into consideration a company’s “big, hairy and audacious goals (BHAG)” – one that they aspire for, the desired future state. At the heart of creating a moonshot goal is a dream, a vision of what possibilities are laid out for a company, institution, organization or community. It also constitutes a commitment, providing stakeholders an idea of where the company will put their efforts on, where they will make their marks. Lastly, moonshot goals are important because of the impact that it brings.
In doing the Moonshot tool, the question to ask first is "what does the community want to leave behind?". This provides a framing for what are the parts of the current status quo that stakeholders want to stay away from. This also provides a great framing for the next question which is "what is the shared dream of the community?". Allow as much time as possible for this question. Encourage stakeholders to be expansive and not to constrain themselves and their imagination.
What fascinates me the most in this tool are the questions "what are the forces working against the community?" and "what happens if the community fail in its mission?"
In working with these questions my suggestions are to:
1. Provide the framing why these questions are relevant
-forces working against the community can help them identify challenges and ALSO plan on how to work on these challenges (WOOP technique!)
- what happens if the community fail in its mission is not just a gloom and doom perspective. It is a powerful way to tap in to what an organization deem as important. This is another technique to bring out the essentials of organizations and can reconnect them to their why.
2. Get as varied stakeholders as possible
Using this tool to allow more voices in the community to be heard can be very powerful! Dreaming together, imagining the challenges and pitfalls together can be a great way to activate the organization or community!
Please do let me know if you tried this tool with your community or your organization!
