Creating Futures that Matter Today: Facilitating Change through Shared Vision

Stop Looking Sideways, Start Looking Forward

Whether you are a business or nonprofit leader, a consultant, a coach or an educator, this book will provide you with a step-by-step methodology and practical tools to help teams envision, design, and implement important new organizational futures. Creating Futures that Matter Today: Facilitating Change through Shared Vision demonstrates how creating shared vision positively impacts an organization's ability to address the critical challenges it faces. Parker and Pool offer convincing examples of how to use visionary thinking with any team seeking to discover new opportunities. The book helps leaders and teams activate their intuitive, creative, and imaginative capabilities and align around achievable solutions-solutions that are motivating, inclusive, innovative-clear enough to provide a compelling framework for making decisions today.

Marjorie Parker is an organizational consultant who during her long career has focused on partnering with organizations searching for new ways to support creativity and innovation.

Anna Pool has dedicated 25 years of her career to talent management consulting, executive coaching, and facilitation of leadership and organizational development. 

Anna Pool is a business consultant and strategic thinker who has facilitated leadership and organizational development across a broad range of industries and clients, including Michelin, Shell, Verizon, Citi, Bayer, Nike, Raytheon and the Ford Motor Company, as well as numerous government agencies. A master-level certified executive coach with the Association of Corporate Executive Coaches, she is a trusted advisor to top leadership, providing insight, tough feedback and helping leaders build innovative and collaborative environments where the desired future state can be envisioned and systematically enabled. She is president of Executive Savvy, (www.executivesavvyinc.com), a boutique consulting firm headquartered in Durango, Colorado. Her business background includes experience at the Director and Board level of an alternative health care facility, benchmarked by the Harvard Medical School as one of the most innovative and effective of its kind. She is the former Director of Organizational Consulting for Lore International Institute (now a Korn Ferry company). She also served as the organizational learning consultant for Ford's New Business Leader program, an innovative action-learning program that was benchmarked by the International Consortium on Executive Development as among the best in the world. Anna is the author of the Bronze Telly Award-winning video series, Effective People Skills, and is the co-author of Lore's 360 Assessment of Collaborative Tendencies. She holds a Master's degree in Organizational Development from the Fielding Institute in Santa Barbara, CA, and has completed a two-year certification with The Gestalt Institute of the Berkshires. Website: www.futuresthatmatter.com

Marjorie Parker is an organizational consultant who has been recognized for over 30 years as a thought leader in the field of creativity. A native of Rochester, Minnesota, Marjorie resides in Oslo, Norway. She has consulted with senior management in Norway's leading corporations, health care institutions and government agencies and has been a frequent speaker at international conferences on creativity and innovation. Marjorie was awarded a national scholarship from the Norwegian Council for Leadership Development and a stipend from the Norwegian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research to document her work using a shared visioning approach to organizational development. She is the author of Creating Shared Vision - The Story of a Pioneering Approach to Organizational Revitalization, published in the US, Poland, Norway and Saudi Arabia. Peter Senge, author of the acclaimed book The Fifth Discipline, wrote the following in the foreword: "The story told in Creating Shared Vision is fascinating. It should be mandatory reading for those interested in revitalizing their organizations and in moving toward becoming learning organizations". The story of Creating Shared Vision has been a feature of a BBC/Open University production. Marjorie is also co-author of Dialogue - A Practical Guide (in Norwegian). She holds an M.Sc. from International Center for Studies in Creativity, Buffalo, NY. Today Marjorie focuses on mentoring organizational consultants who are searching for new ways to develop a more creative mind-set within their own client organizations.