Part of the Present Forward: A Five-Phase Process for Problem-Focused Strategy's Strategy Sprint, this exercise asks each participant to imagine a future news article covering the team's progress: "Imagine two years there's a newspaper there's a journalist that covers this work and there's a newspaper article that comes out and I want you to imagine the progress on all these strategic pillars and what the headline of that newspaper article looks like." Each person writes their own headline independently.
The individually generated headlines are then synthesized into one unified "winning aspiration" statement using a "blender" method — combining recurring language and ambition level across headlines rather than picking one person's version or averaging them into something bland. The exercise produces a memorable, motivating expression of success that complements the more analytical pillar-selection work of Strategy Sprint Day 2: Problem Clustering, Reframing, and Pillar Ranking.
After each person writes their own future-dated headline, the group converges on one unified winning-aspiration statement via a 'blender' technique: scanning everyone's headlines for common recurring words and phrases, then using those as raw material for the single combined statement — rather than picking one person's headline or negotiating line-by-line.