A vision statement can guide your team or organization, but it needs to stimulate real action. Don’t waste your time on vague, feel-good catchphrases. Try this approach:
- Recruit a diverse team. Don’t start crafting a vision by yourself, and don’t include only your usual group of friends and colleagues. Your vision-building team should include people from outside your department, and include employees who work closely with customers, current customers and suppliers, and people from the top, middle, and lower levels of your group or organization.
- Define your process and purpose. Discuss the project with your team and work out some boundaries. What’s your objective in creating a vision? How do you plan to go about the task? What will the final vision look and sound like? Setting this out ahead of time minimizes the chances that you’ll fall prey to “mission creep” and try to accomplish too much with your project.
- Take your time. A vision that inspires people to action doesn’t come out of a single afternoon brainstorming session. Every member of your team needs to spend time asking questions about the organization, your industry, customers, competitors, trends—everything that affects the success of your vision. You have to build a foundation of learning before you can go forward.
- Think from a future perspective. Don’t base your vision on where you are today, but on where you want to be in five years, or 10, or 50. Pretend you’re writing a history of the organization and talk about the directions you took and the obstacles you had to overcome in order to succeed.
- Base your vision on principle. An effective vision isn’t about processes or products, but principles— guidelines for action and behavior. Explore the values that guide the organization: What’s their impact on what people do? Rely on principles that are timeless and easy to grasp, even if they’re sometimes difficult to live up to.