A few weeks back I fly to San Diego. Having forgone the luxury of paying two dollars for a cup of lukewarm burnt coffee I gaze out the window through the haze to the landscape below—below is one of those redundant words since if I’m gazing at the landscape above we must be flying inverted, in which case I should be assuming the crash position. It’s amazing how clear everything becomes from 30,000’. I can see clearly where I want to go. Looking at the highways, one would think it difficult to ever get lost; follow the white line, turn right at the lake, then follow the next white line.

Lost is a lot easier when you are on the ground. I got a GPS for Christmas because in Philly, I am the king of lost. I’ve lived here 13 years and driven to the city on my own three times, and I don’t anticipate a fourth. I’ve traveled the world without a map, but put me in my own backyard and it’s an instant panic attack. That wasn’t the case when I lived in Denver, Colorado. Colorado was easy; there were three cities of note and a mountain range, so I always knew where I was.

Or, almost always. The first time I lived in Colorado my room and meals were free, courtesy of the US Air Force Academy—so were the haircuts. Basic training is an exercise one must experience to fully comprehend. We had about a thousand Alpha eighteen year-olds being yelled at by a thousand Alphas two years older. I learned early on that the best way to excel was to turn the entire experience into a competition, us against them—outthink, outwit, outlast—sort of like Survivor in uniforms. Several weeks into basic, we left the relative comforts of the academy and moved en-mass to a camp ground called Jack’s Valley—KOA on steroids. We did all sorts of fun things at camp; shined boots, raked dirt, learned how to kill with a bayonet.

And since the Air Force knew that wars weren’t always fought during the day, we did a number of nighttime activities. One such activity involved a compass, a partner, and a very dark forest. I think the idea of the exercise was to teach us how to find our way home if we were shot down. We’d been up since five, so naturally I was looking for a way to shorten the exercise while still scoring the maximum number of points. We were given our first compass bearing and we headed into the night in search of our next bearing. About an hour into the exercise I did an extrapolation based on the azimuth of the sun and the number of pieces of bubble gum it would take to fix a flat tire, and I told my partner I had a pretty good idea about where we were supposed to wind up the exercise. I argued that if I was right we could save ourselves more than an hour. He argued that were I wrong, we would finish last. I must have swayed him. We took a bearing on a light we could see from out spot in the forest. The light was from the city of Colorado Springs. We dashed through the forest, every hundred yards or so, stopping only long enough to recalibrate our bearing. We were making great time.

There’s a funny thing about lights. Sometimes they’re on. And sometimes, when you’re dashing through a forest with a compass in the middle of the night, someone turns them off. For those not familiar with the sport of orienteering, if that is the only fixed point you have to determine your position relative to everything on the planet, having the light go out will hinder your score. It did ours. There’s last, and then there’s so last that people have to come and find you in the very dark forest. This meant that the people whose job it was to yell at me during the day were going to miss their sleep all on account of my bright idea. They were highly motivated yellers the next day.

So much for my visionary idea. We were discussing that one of the basic requirements of the patient experience champion is their ability to visualize. In addition to being able visualize the end game, the vision must be credible. One can’t say follow me into the forest without knowing how to get to the other side. That said, the point of the exercise is that the first thing the champion must do is to define the vision. The roadmap will follow, but you have to know what the future will entail. We call that your “to be” state. Today is your “as is”, and the difference between the two is your Gap. If it sounds simplistic, that’s because we haven’t done anything yet. If you want to see how many people you have in your camp, start kicking around your notion of your “to be” model.