Strategy
A vision your team can act on: how to make it clear, specific, and useful
Most vision statements end up on a wall. A useful vision is different: specific enough to guide choices, concrete enough that people can see themselves in it, and alive enough to evolve as you learn.
Ask a team what their organization’s vision is and you’ll often get a pause, then a half-remembered sentence from a strategic plan. The words exist. They just aren’t doing any work.
A vision is supposed to do work. It orients people when the path is unclear, helps them decide what matters most, and gives them a reason to care. When it’s doing that work, people make better decisions without waiting to be told, because they know where the team is headed and why.
Here’s how we define it with the leaders and teams we work with:
Effective change leaders create a clear and detailed vision for the future and make it concrete enough that their teams, colleagues, and stakeholders can see themselves in it and are inspired to take ownership and action.
They communicate the work through the frame of that vision, and they lead by providing context. They make purpose, direction, and goals clear in a way that inspires, while helping people see how their own work connects to the bigger picture.
Is your vision dialed in?
Vision is one of the four domains of team performance, and like the others, you can get it wrong in either direction. Too little and people feel lost. Too much and they feel overwhelmed.
Under calibrated
Vision is too small, vague, missing, or undefined.
Team feelsConfused, lost, uninspired
Dialed in
Vision is clear, specific, and connected to the work.
Team feelsInspired, focused, clear
Over calibrated
Vision is too big, ambitious, complicated, or impossible.
Team feelsOverwhelmed, exhausted, cynical
Either way, the team loses focus. Most leaders have a natural lean. Knowing yours is the first step to correcting for it.
Six ideas that make vision useful
1. Vision is a compass
In navigational leadership, vision is the north star. You won’t know every turn of the route, and you shouldn’t pretend to. But everyone should know which way is north, so that when the team stops to check its bearings, it has something to check against.
That takes inspiration and context, not just instruction. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry put it well: if you want to build a ship, don’t start by assigning tasks. Teach people to yearn for the sea.
2. Vision gets specific
Inspiration alone doesn’t tell anyone what to do on Monday. A vision becomes useful when it’s translated into goals and objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. The yearning gets you moving. The specifics tell you whether you’re getting there.
3. Vision happens at every altitude
- Organization
- Team
- Project
- Deliverable
- Meeting
At every level, vision answers
- Why are we doing this?
- What are we doing?
- What does success look like?
Vision isn’t only for the CEO’s annual address. A team needs one. So does a project, a deliverable, and even a meeting. At every level, the same three questions apply. The implication: vision is part of everyone’s job.
4. Vision enables focus
An effective vision implies choices, narrowing, and betting. It isn’t one that tries to be or do everything. Clear vision sounds like:
- These are the three features that will make our product different.
- This is what we’ll do first, second, and third.
- By the end of this meeting, we should be able to…
- These are the values that will guide our decisions.
- This is the person we’re trying to reach.
If your vision doesn’t help anyone say no to something, it isn’t specific enough yet.
5. Effective visionaries paint the done picture
Look as far and as specifically into the future as you can. Describe the outcome or deliverable you’re working toward. Then use the journey to fill in the pieces as you go. It works for a meeting, a process, or an entire project. A useful test: could someone else execute toward this picture without you in the room? That’s also what makes good delegation possible.
6. Vision evolves intentionally
Too hot
The vision shifts with every new idea or hard week. People get whiplash and stop investing in it.
Too cold
The vision never changes, even when the context does. It becomes wall art.
Just right
The vision is revisited at planned moments, and changes are made deliberately and explained.
Building those planned moments into the calendar is one reason we organize work into change cycles. Each cycle ends with a pause to check the vision against what you’ve learned.
The ingredients of a strong vision
- Starts with a problem, the opportunity it creates, and a strong why
- Names the difference between the current state and the future state
- Defines the key features of the solution and how you’ll measure success
- Includes a vision for process: a broad roadmap from here to there
- Is clear and detailed enough that people can see themselves in it
- Is communicated often and used as an anchor for process and problem solving
From vision to a theory of action
The bridge between a vision and the work is a theory of action: a simple chain of logic that connects what you do to the change you want to see. If we do these things, in these ways, we’ll create these conditions, which will lead to these outcomes, and progress toward our vision.
What we do
Build an awesome product, sell it successfully into schools and libraries, and provide excellent client support.
How we do it
Motivate reading through streaks, competition, and gamification, with an awesome team and a healthy culture.
Enabling conditions
Engaged users and high client retention, a repeatable sales motion, and high team positivity and productivity.
Outcomes
A culture of reading in schools, libraries, and the communities they serve.
Vision
More kids reading more books and loving reading, so they can learn, develop, and thrive.
Read it as a sentence: if we do these things, in these ways, we’ll create these conditions, leading to these outcomes, and progress toward our vision.
A theory of action makes the vision testable. Each link is a hypothesis. When something isn’t working, you can see which link is weak, and adjust the work rather than abandoning the vision.
It’s also the backbone of strategic planning built for rapid change: instead of a fixed plan, a clear destination, a theory of how you’ll get there, and regular moments to learn and adjust.
Start with one altitude
You don’t need to rewrite your organization’s vision this week. Pick one thing you’re leading right now, a project, a deliverable, or even your next meeting, and paint the done picture. Ask whether it’s under or over calibrated. Name what it helps you say no to. Then share it, and see whether your team can see themselves in it.