Tomorrow I'm giving a talk on the business of sustainability at a well-known business school. In particular, I'm going to talk about vision. As I'm putting together my slides, I think that "vision" is a horizontal promotion.
My wife used to work at the Saïd Business School in Oxford, and I was a fellow in the Complex Systems Group. One of the things I remember most from that time was that "if you want to increase your income, it's better to take the same skills and move laterally to a sector where there's more money to be made." He said this is called horizontal promotion. A military doctor who did a one-year MBA immediately got a job at a big pharmaceutical company, and her income multiplied in one year.
Creating a vision, which is working backwards towards that vision, setting goals for the project, and predicting what the outcome, has been used in the United Nations and other public development projects as a log framework. The logframework is only responsible for the project's outcome. Still, it also assesses the project's impact in terms of its contribution to achieving the vision in a several year. We also work backwards from the project's results to produce project activities and inputs.
This log framework fits neatly into the 5-step process I use in my SDGs classes. The SDGs are all about creating a vision, and since the UN led the way in creating the SDGs, it was natural to use the log-framework approach.
Through the SDGs, I hope that the log framework will be used as a horizontal promotion to increase the company's profits and improve the world.