Vision

What it is, and why it stays on paper

The vision is the distant point the company is moving towards. It gets quoted often and internalised rarely, because it asks you to imagine over the long term, and ordinary working life doesn’t train that muscle. What gets shared here is a dream, and there’s no ceiling on how high it’s allowed to be: when you dream you look at things for what they could become.

The most common misunderstanding is that, being abstract, it stays a matter of principle. The opposite is true: its consequences are practical and immediate, because the vision is what you use to decide which objectives are worth setting at all.

An example that separates vision from mission

Microsoft had a vision you can say in six words: a computer on every desk. Very different missions could have come out of that same vision. Becoming the largest maker of personal computers, say, or producing screens. The mission they chose was another one again: making software.

The vision describes the world you want to see. The mission is the specific game you decide to play inside that world. They’re two distinct things and they get confused constantly, with the result that people write missions nobody then knows how to execute.

How you test it

You don’t test a vision by asking whether people like it. In a meeting, people always like it.

You test it with open questions, the ones you can’t answer with a yes. They’re there to get people saying what they actually think instead of what they believe is expected, and to find out how each person has pictured the future just described to them.

The useful moment is the one where a reservation surfaces. If the plan involves opening an office somewhere else, some will take it as an adventure and some will be afraid of moving away from their family. Neither reaction is the wrong one, and the two people need accompanying differently. The damage comes from discovering it afterwards.

If you’re setting off on a journey, everybody may as well have packed, and nobody should be carrying ballast instead of luggage.

Why objectives on their own don’t hold

Does selling ten per cent more change anybody’s life? Almost never. What changes is how the challenge is perceived.

The most effective image is the cathedral building site. Someone who experiences the work as laying one brick on top of another and someone who experiences it as contributing to a thing that will still be standing in centuries are making exactly the same movement, and they are not doing the same thing. The energy they put in is different, and over time it shows in the result.

Stephen Covey put the principle in a formula: begin with the end in mind. Put more bluntly, begin by thinking about what you’d want written in your obituary. If you have no idea what you want to leave behind, you’re unlikely to arrive there by accident.

What it has to be like

Shareable, meaning formulated so that each person can recognise a part of their own work inside it. Clear, to the point that anyone who hears it can repeat it without re-reading it. And projected far enough ahead that it hasn’t already been reached.

A group with no direction meets the same obstacles as a group that has one. The difference is that the second sees them coming and goes around them, while in the first everyone pulls towards whatever gives them the most immediate advantage. A team with no heading is a ship that doesn’t know where it’s going, and sooner or later it finds the rocks.

The most frequent mistakes

In defining a vision, the mistakes repeat, and they’re almost always these.

1. Not dreaming it big enough. A vision you reach next quarter is an objective with the wrong name on it.
2. Not testing it at every level. It gets shared with the people who decide and assumed for everybody else.
3. Taking it as understood. Nobody who heard it is ever asked to repeat it in their own words, which is the only way to know whether it landed.
4. Phrasing it so that it moves nobody. Correct, agreeable, and incapable of getting anyone out of their chair.
5. Phrasing it so that it sounds unreachable. If nobody believes it’s possible, nobody tries.
6. Leaving it disconnected from the identity and the mission. It stays a separate statement that touches nobody’s work.

These mistakes are common to the point of being the rule. The outcome is always the same: people work towards a number, and very little gets built that outlasts the current year.