Dreaming Circle

Posted on 2025-10-15 14:10:00+02:00 in tools • Written by Arno Peters

The Dreaming Circle is a process for elucidating a vision. A vision puts a dot on the horizon of where you would like to end up. A vision can be for a project, for a company, for your life, for a partnership.

Creating a vision statement has a few aims:

  • Capture the needs participants of the project try to fulfill and to make these visible for all participants
  • Engender enthusiasm for the project from all participants because their needs are being met by the project
  • Facilitate going from "This is my project you're working on"/"This is your project I'm working on" to "This is our project we're working on".

The process has three phases:

  • gathering information,
  • organizing the information and
  • constructing a coherent vision.

Note that this process needs to be revisited as participants join or leave a project. Because of this, the vision can drift as new participants can have different needs from the original founders of the project. These will have to be taken into consideration.

Gathering information

  • Gather everybody involved in the project in a circle

  • Ask participants to contemplate the following question:

    “What would this project have to be like that afterward you can
say, you could not have spent your time in any better way?“

  • After a few minutes of sitting with the question in silence, start going around the circle. Use a talking stick or similar technology. Write down what comes up on a whiteboard, on sticky notes or on loose pieces of paper that are visible to everyone.

  • Every participant shares a keyword or a small phrase (max 3 words) about what they find important about this project. If people have multiple words or phrases, these can be shared in subsequent rounds.

  • Keep going around the circle until everybody indicates there are no more words coming to mind.

Organizing

The next phase is the ordering and categorizing of the information gathered.

  • Cluster words and phrases that speak to a common concern or need; ask participants for clarification if necessary. Having pieces of paper that can freely move around is helpful;
  • Find a descriptive word for each cluster;

Constructing of the vision statement

  • With the cluster words, construct one or more sentences. Write the sentence in the present tense as if it was already true. Start with the following:

    <project> is a ...

Further reading

Dragon Dreaming