From Vision to Value: Leading Transformation Through Mindset and Design

Most leaders naturally have one of three mindsets: visionary, builder, or auditor. While your literal role may hold these perspectives, which one shapes how you approach growth and transformation? Visionaries push boundaries, builders turn ideas into reality, and auditors refine and optimize. All have value, but long-term success demands an awareness of when to protect your natural inclinations and when anchoring in them becomes the biggest risk of all.

The Power of Structured Messiness  

I remember the first time I intentionally endorsed a period of structured chaos—a year in which product teams focused solely on strengthening their own growth rather than that of the collective value. The risk of delayed alignment was real, but the gain in product strength proved invaluable. What was essential was that it was conscious and communicated. It was a step in the process, which was needed.

In fact, sometimes it is essential to embrace and architect for a degree of messiness. Had the team tried to integrate before products had built strength, the offering would have been too weak. The challenge comes when full businesses operate like this, and the responsibility of bringing the offering together gets put on the customer or those closest to the customer.

This is not dissimilar to what we see with some of the technological innovations that stand strong in their own right, but those who have built them don’t always hold the responsibility of the integration and usage. Unfortunately, this just means that many great offerings get neglected because they are too hard to use, and all efforts end up wasted. So messiness is a part of transformation, but it must be deliberate and articulated. Because, as leaders, being able to clearly communicate the necessity of discomfort sets your organization up for lasting success.

Mapping the Path to Ambition  

When teams get disconnected from the ambition or morph in a thousand different directions, a simple but powerful tool I often utilize is drawing a trajectory map—a graph with axes typically representing time and value (in any desired metrics). I place a big powerful star in the top right corner, illustrating the ambition. If the teams don’t have one, we create one, applying the thinking shared within visioning brought to their context. I then ask teams to plot all their great initiatives onto the chart toward the star. Once all is added, we try to make a progress trajectory from the start toward the star.

A couple of things always occur. The first contributions scatter wide across the base, panning out almost like a fan. The subsequent wave starts to look at the elements already delivered, how these can be built on, and how you can make more decisive prioritization and decisions based on the value these have shown.  Last, when you have reached your star at the end and ask the teams to go back and connect the dots with the fewest, yet all relevant points, you see a zigzag path through. This is because naturally not all initiatives will deliver as key a value when looked at it broadly as this, but also value is likely to be accumulated if sequenced right.

It is fun to do this with a few different lenses on, for example, have three teams hold the same graph and ambition, with one looking at the journey through the customer experience lens, one through the employee experience lens, and the last through the process lens. When brought together, it will certainly change the sequencing of some of the elements projected.

Different Perspectives, Smarter Decisions  

This highlights an essential truth in architecting for achievement: Different perspectives exist in every organization and knowing when to play which card is critical to orchestrating change. Engineers naturally focus on features and functionality, while marketers look at consumer needs and desires. In times of rapid transformation, these perspectives can create friction. But when leaders blend tactical expertise with visionary thinking, and operational efficiency with customer-centric innovation, they ensure that execution and ambition are seamlessly aligned. The ability to harness these different viewpoints is often what separates companies that execute well from those that merely react.

My team at Google was once helping a massive business transformation. The customer had told us that their main cost and process challenge was customer service; however, from doing this exercise, we found that the lack of information from the operational teams would never position the customer service teams to win, so when we repeated the exercise with the operational teams, we found the real key to unlocking value and margins for the business was, in fact, in data contracting. Think about how much money could have been wasted here.

Finding the Real Levers of Value  

If you were to do that for your business, are there decisions you should be making that are being neglected? Could there be budget reallocations that would unlock greater value across the business, even if they represent a fundamental shift from the previous year? In architecting for achievement as responsible for strategic business transformation at Google, I have also, along with my talented team, done a similar exercise at industry level.

When we looked at the industry movements and started to decode the patterns, it was striking to see that executives typically only chose from a handful of strategic options. Within an industry, the fundamental strategies often boil down to just two to six distinct paths. Understanding these options is not just about competitive awareness; it is about deciding where you seek to shape an industry and where you position yourself to actively ride the coattails of others.

Pioneers create new value pools, shift ecosystems, and challenge existing structures. Market reapers optimize within established models, benefitting from shifts driven by others. Both can be very profitable but remember that the pioneers often get to define the rules of engagement—so we need to be sure there is enough growth within the followers if we choose to play here. Take banking: The industry is already evolving, yet large institutions hesitate. Smaller players disrupt by showing customers different forms of engagement, some by taking a greater role in managing their economy. These assets these banks hold—vast amounts of customer data, behavioral insights, and lifecycle spending information—are some of the most powerful tools available to them. Yet they sit on it. They know more about their customers than anyone else, but how are they using that information and building a platform to become undisputable based on the volume of insights they build?

Leadership is about seeing the storm coming and steering the ship before anyone else does. Assets alone don’t guarantee leadership; it’s the strategic application of those assets that defines success. Whether you are shaping an industry or optimizing within one, you must stay vigilant—listening for internal and external signals, understanding when to push forward, when to pause, and when to course-correct.

Written by Louisa Loran. Adapted and excerpted from Leadership Anatomy in Motion: Empowering You to Lead Through Technology and People (Fast Company Press, October 2025). Have you read?
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