Getting started
What does that mean in terms of vision? We're going to think of vision in a very specific way. This is what I've seen again and again, help get the vision out of just the founder's head or the leader's head, or even the individual contributors heads, and make it something that. You can engage with. Every individual in the company can engage with, they can contribute to it, tweak it.
Step one is we need to have a sense of vision and purpose that's provide the initial boundaries to keep everyone working in an aligned way. Once we get that in place, we need to outline the specific behaviors that we're going to encourage in our business. These are the things that make up our culture. We like to think of culture as this kind of fuzzy way. I believe the thing that builds culture is valuing specific behaviors and discouraging other specific behaviors. If you look up good academic definitions of culture, the best I've seen basically say culture is the collection of behaviors you encourage and discourage. So we're going to get very specific about that. Once we have those guardrails set up, we can focus in even more by distilling that information into a crisp, concise vision.
What is a good vision?
Now there's tons of articles on what a good vision is and what what a good mission is, and what "mission" means. I've got a little bit different perspective. After collecting hundreds and hundreds of mission statements and looking at what really worked in other businesses and for our clients, we found the simplest way to think of mission is this: it's the title of the story that you're writing through these other components we've just outlined. And we're going to give you something that that helps you work up to that point. Because once you have those, you can start to reduce your business to its key fundamental metrics. Those are the ways you keep score.
You'll find six, maybe at most twelve health indicators that let you know your business is functioning in a healthy manner. And when you have that, you can start to tell the story to your team: "here's where and why we're trying to get those numbers." And that in turn, finally allows you to make sense of your strategy in terms of goals that you're actually setting. This is true whether you're using objectives and key results, or some other goal setting system. Those goals start to give you the path forward. That's really important because execution requires those things to really be clear if you want execution to be as crisp as it can be.
More perspectives on how vision fits into the larger picture
Let's look at this from a few different angles, because I've talked about how we can create a really solid direction so everyone's on the same page. Everyone's driving forward. Everyone has a clear sense of where we're trying to go and why that's important. We're also going to look at some of the common ways people frame vision and really try to narrow it down into something simple that you can understand without having to acquire an additional business degree or reading 75 more books on the subject.