Vision, mission and strategy

Leadership is synonymous with defining the vision (why), mission (what) and strategy (how). VMS.... as easy as 123

There are many ways to describe the why, what and how of organisations but they all boil down to essentially the same things: vision, mission and strategy (VMS).

There are many pitfalls in encapsulating VMS well. And as photographer Ansel Adams said:

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

More than anything, leadership is about (a) absolute clarity on the VMS itself and (b) expressing it succinctly yet seductively, so that others want to join in and play their part.

Getting either - or both - part(s) of this equation wrong is surprisingly easy. Let’s take a look at each component in more detail.

Vision

The vision is the why. It should feel inspirational. It should be enduring in the sense that it can’t be ‘achieved’, complete and ticked off as if part of a to-do list.

To state the obvious, people in the organisation should believe in the righteousness of the vision. That doesn’t mean the vision has to be pious but it must contain a sense of purpose that goes beyond profit-generation - after all, the respective vision of competitors can’t be precisely the same or else why are they competing? Companies may share a red-blooded lust for capitalism whilst engaging in a battle of ideas. Some might even say, that’s rather the idea.

I would argue that Google’s mission statement actually contains its vision (I’ve struck out the rest for now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves!):

Google’s mission statement

To organise the world’s information is why Google exists beyond selling ads. It is an audacious thing to aim for given the immense and increasing complexity of the ‘world’s information’. It cannot ever be finished.

Mission

The mission is the what. The mission is what the organisation is seeking to achieve at a practical level. It is the goal which products or services are there to deliver. Crucially, the mission exists for people outside the organisation as well as those within it. The mission must create value in the pockets - or perceptions - of others.

In the case of our Google example, the mission builds on the vision by adding conditions which ensure this value-creation is baked in:

Our mission is to organise the world’s information [ie. the VISION] and make it universally accessible and useful.

Like all good such statements, this one enables Googlers to ask themselves the fundamental question “is what I’m doing getting us closer to achieving the mission?”.

One can conceive of ways in which the world’s information could be organised but not made accessible, or organised but not made accessible universally. And even so, is the organised, universally accessible information finally useful? All three tests must be met.

Strategy

Of the holy trinity of VMS, strategy is the most beguiling. Strategy is the how.

There are a number of problems with the word strategy. Firstly, it is an ‘irregular noun’ - one of those deadly concepts that is easy to say but understood differently by different people at different times. Secondly, it has an unfair advantage over its uglier twin ‘tactics’. Your tactical suggestion will never be as good as my strategic one. We have all been in that meeting, haven’t we. Thirdly, strategy is seen as exciting and where the action is. This often leads to a risk of verbosity when it comes to setting out the strategy. Trust me, less is more.

The classic mistake is to spend an inordinate amount of time creating an articulately crafted and lengthy treatise, which then stays on the proverbial shelf whilst teams and the organisation busily enact some other strategy or worse, a plethora of strategies. If you find yourself word-smithing the strategy in a long document, then it probably means that it is insufficiently clear. And lack of clarity means it won’t happen. As the old joke goes (attributed to various writers over the years):

I would have written something shorter, but I didn’t have the time.

It takes deliberate focus to distill the strategy down into crisp statements but it is absolutely worth the effort. I strongly recommend use of a small set of principles rather than prescriptive detail as this approach allows for sensible interpretation to evolve as circumstances change. If you find you need to change strategy in response to shifting marketing conditions frequently, then perhaps you were on the wrong path in the first place.

Most importantly, teams and the whole organisation must be able to recall what the strategy is. That may seem self-evident, but I invite you to think about how many workplaces you have been in where it held true. Quite simply, if you or colleagues cannot remember what your guiding strategic principles are, then the chance of implementing them is zero. That is why they should be short, written in straightforward language and few in number.

And also because…

Strategy is denial

In the same way that taking a photograph is mostly about excluding a large radius of arc in three dimensions and selecting and capturing only a tiny fraction of what you can see, strategy is predominately about what you won’t do, not what you will.

Distraction is the enemy of strategic execution. In order to train your attention on something in particular, the photographer removes the distraction of everything else. If it does not add to what the photographer wishes to convey, then it subtracts from it. Nothing is neutral. Strategy is the same.

Together with the vision and the mission, the strategy acts as a filter to understand whether the organisation should engage with a situation at all (be it opportunity or threat) and if yes, how to do so. “Do nothing” should be the valid, default option unless the VMS says otherwise.

VMS and leadership

Leadership is synonymous with defining the VMS. This process can be - and perhaps should be - a collaborative one but ultimately leaders are accountable for the vision, mission and strategy. It is what they are there for. Allowing the VMS to be created by others and/or tolerating ambiguity is a dereliction of duty.

Conversely, the better the VMS and the more crystal its clarity, the more the organisation will thrive organically. Leaders have to do less work once they have put in the hard yards at the beginning.