This exercise brings your legal leadership team together to envision your department's future through images rather than words. By stepping away from typical strategic planning language, you'll tap into creative thinking and build genuine alignment around what success looks like for your team.
What It Is
The Ambition Setting Exercise asks your leadership team to imagine they're curating an exhibition one year from now that showcases your legal department's transformation and progress. Working together, the team selects 8-10 images (or objects) that represent the achievements and characteristics they want to celebrate. The discussion about why certain images resonate reveals shared values, aspirations, and priorities that form the foundation of your department's ambition.
Why It Matters
Most strategic planning sessions start with abstract discussions that can feel disconnected from day-to-day reality. This visual, collaborative approach:
- Gets people thinking creatively rather than defensively
- Surfaces what your team truly values without jargon
- Creates buy-in through shared ownership of the vision
- Produces memorable, tangible representations of your ambition that resonate more than mission statements
What You'll Need
- Time: 30 minutes (20 minutes for selection and discussion, 10 minutes for presentation)
- Participants: Your legal leadership team (5-8 people works best)
- Materials: Either 100 stock images printed individually or 25-30 random objects (see How-To Guide for details)
How to Use This
Run this exercise as the opening activity when you're ready to define or refresh your department's strategic direction. The output鈥攜our selected images and rationale鈥攂ecomes the raw material for translating your ambition into clear, actionable goals. This isn't about landing on a perfectly polished mission statement during the workshop; it's about unlocking the creative thinking that makes meaningful goal-setting possible.
Remember: The images your team chooses and the stories they tell about them reveal more about your shared ambition than any mission statement drafted in isolation.
You've defined your vision鈥攏ow turn it into action. Use the outcomes of the Ambition Setting Exercise to shape clear strategic goals, then return to the toolkit to begin developing the metrics that will measure your progress.