ESTABLISHING A COMPREHENSIVE VISION

This article is written to suggest a model for building a vision for your business, charity, not for profit, church or public sector organisation. My experience has been that terms such as ‘vision’, ‘mission’, ‘principles’ are widely used to mean different things to different people. Where there is a lack of clarity about what the terms mean there is usually a lack of clarity about the vision. Lots of corporate sounding words strung together that convey nothing. 

This is a model I have used with a variety of organisations which you may find helpful. 

“Enduring organisations have clear plans for how they will advance into an uncertain future. But they are equally clear about how they will remain steadfast about their values and purposes.” 

CORE PURPOSE

This is the reason why the organisation exists. What is its overall intention expressed in an outward focussed way; what are you doing for others. It should be motivational, engaging the heart as well as the head. This communicates purpose (the Why) of the organisation, its most fundamental reason for being. It reflects the idealistic motivations for doing what they do. It may never be completed. It has an enduring quality and it INSPIRES CHANGE. 

Not to be confused with your MISSION which is a description of what business you are in. That is what you do, who you do it for, and what you provide. 

ENVISIONED FUTURE

Describes how the organisation will be in a future successful state. If the organisation were to achieve all its strategic goals what would it look like, feel like, smell like, sound like, taste like? This will be inspirational and aspirational. It will challenge and inspire. 

It’s a vivid description which paints a picture of what it will be like to achieve the massive ambitious and audacious goals we have. Translates this into pictures people can carry in their heads, It conveys passion, emotion, conviction . 

AUDACIOUS & AMBITIOUS GOALS 

These goals present a huge challenge yet a worthwhile one. They are clear and compelling. There is risk involved for at present you do not have the skills, knowledge, technology, resources etc to achieve them. Nevertheless the organisation has belief it can reach the goal anyway. It will require effort and some luck or divine intervention.  NASA’s goal was to put a man on the moon. It may be 10 to 30 years before they are achieved. They cause us as leaders to be visionary and not just strategic and tactical. 

VALUES (core ideology) 

“its more important to know who you are than where you are going” 

These capture what the organisation stands for. They describe what it believes in and how it will behave. They provide a moral compass guiding decision making. They establish a standard against which actions can be assessed. 

They are timeless in character, the glue that holds the organisation together even when all else is up for grabs. 

You cannot invent or fake it. You do not so much create or set core ideology, you discover it. You deduce it/ understand it by looking inside the organisation. Ideology has to be authentic. We describe not those values we think the organisation ought to have but those it does have. 

The importance is NOT the written content of the ideology but the way the organisation lives it. They will be meaningful and inspirational to staff, volunteers and members. It is your lived values that will shape the CULTURE of the organisation and not the written words.

When recruiting staff you need to find people who are predisposed to your core purpose and values. 

The core values will be a handful of guiding principles by which the organisation navigates. They will require no external justification. 

It is suggested you have between 3 and 5 core values. You’ll know that they are your core values by asking; if circumstances changed and you were penalised for holding these core values would you still hold them? Not to be confused with operating practices, business strategies, cultural norms. 

You may chose to use your values to feed into a code of ethics describing in greater detail PRINCIPLES of behaviour and attitude which those guided by your values will exhibit.