Who creates vision?

Over the last couple of months I have been involved in helping teams and organisations to create their strategic direction/plans.

Obviously the key question is: Where do we want to be and what do we want to achieve in the next period of time? They are asking vision type questions.

I have noticed that there is confusion and tension about who’ and how’ to create vision.

Some team leaders and middle managers struggle with the fact that they are beholden to the organisations vision and strategic plan. They don’t think they can or should have vision. I disagree with this idea. Wherever you exercise leadership – a team, department, family, business – vision is necessary and possible. If you are leading a team, think of it as a mini-vision. Taking the time and energy to be visionary is crucial for the effectiveness of all enterprises.

Before we explore this topic, let’s make a few things clearer. Vision isn’t about creating a sentence that is punchy, catchy and slick. What you communicate should make sense, should be clear, logically consistent, and all these things we typically focus on. It’s important to get this right, but it is not enough. Vision is a 3D picture, full of detail, optimism, convictions, born from observation and data. You may boil it down to a sentence to communicate it, but if that is all your vision is then it will be anaemic.

For a “vision” to become powerful, it will need to be emotionally engaging: people need to feel something in order to persuade them. Aristotle called it Pathos. That could be excitement or feeling intrigued or provoked through some unconventional elements, but it could equally be a feeling of warmth, caring and bonding through a deeply felt cause.

Vision also needs to be credible and authentic, which implies people need to see it in how the leader behaves. Without authenticity, the vision is merely a set of hollow phrases, and it will equally fail to inspire. This is what Aristotle labelled Ethos, the character of the speaker should align with the words.  

Your behavioural integrity is vital if you don’t want your vision to be mere hollow phrases.   

3 KEY WORDS – SCOPE, CLARITY, BUY-IN

WHAT IS THE SCOPE OF OUR VISION?

The three questions that need to be answered before you should even start to develop a vision for the future.

1. How far out do we want to think about the future? Are we thinking about 3 years, 5 years, 20 years?

2. Do we want/need big and audacious or incremental improvement? The supplementary question to this is: What does our level of authority and resources allow’?

3. Are we focused on the end state for the customers/clients or the end state for the organisation/department/team? This might seem a redundant question however leaders and teams often get confused because they haven’t articulated this dilemma. Focused on customers/clients and the way we frame our vision is about end state for them. Focused on organisation we frame our vision about how we look and are. The implication with this focus is, if we are bigger’, more efficient, offer more services then we will be helping our customers/clients to their end goal. 

These questions provide us with the frame around which the picture can be drawn. Once you have answered these three questions you can go to the next step. 

CREATING CLARITY 

Leaders want to create clarity for the team or organisation.

The key question (within our responsibilities) is  – What is the picture of a preferred future that produces passion in you and others?

Without it, we are simple managing the status quo. There is real skill in being able to imagine a different future, whilst connecting it to the present in a meaningful way.

Too many vision’s’ are full of vague concepts and buzzwords. It doesn’t actually illuminate much at all. To create clarity we need to take a helicopter view, lift up out of the everyday details and into the air of possibility and probability. Often this means getting a vision statement but then connecting it to a couple of major time-lined goals. This makes it tangible.

The connection between creating clarity and buy-in is where the dilemma exists for many leaders. Some of the questions and dilemma’s I notice in my work with leaders: 

• Do I create the vision myself and then tell people?
• What if I’m not very visionary?
• How do I get people to help me create the vision clarity without it taking too long?
• Do I ask the team to create the vision? What if it isn’t really visionary’? 

We are going to address these issues over the next couple of blog posts.