Why do you need it more than you think and how to do it
The secret to a successful, sustainable business and life is having a strategy fired up by a bold vision, a sharp mission and meaningful values.
Not defining them purposefully will carry you in other’s flow, but having them just for the sake of it, it’s equally damaging. You may rise so big from having a coherent strategy, but you may also fall big by the lack of it.
How will you give life to some words, to inspire people to work and live by them?
An easy way to think about your Vision
When we define the vision, we refer to the dream, the aspiration, that thing that seems impossible to achieve from the outside.
It answers to questions like:
Where are we going?
What do we aspire to achieve?
Why does the organisation exist?
What will the organisation be when it gets older?
When you think about it, when answering the previous question when you were little, the way to that dream seemed so far away and sometimes impossible, that all that you got from the adults was: “oooh, you’re so cute” or “wow, that’s a big job”.
Can you imagine that some of the kids that wanted to become an astronaut actually became one? Or that somebody actually dreamed of getting people on the moon? There were even some controversial dreamers that believed that almost everybody would drive a car to work or that there will be a computer or a smartphone in every home?
Well, I learned that you will be able to do something when you're able to dream it. But this is a discussion for another time.
BHAG — The Big Hairy Audacious Goal
In 1994, Jim Colling and Jerry Porras were formulating one of the most comprehensive definitions of the vision:
BHAG — Big Hairy Audacious Goal
which we could translate as a big, complex, comprehensive and daring goal.
BHAG is so big and powerful that it encourages organisations to think and to aim on a level so high that it should be doable only 50–70%. The paradox here is that although the goal doesn’t seem achievable, being “so big”, it creates a sense of urgency, because if you know that you will accomplish it in 25 years, you have to start working right away to get there.
You’ll know it is big enough if you can’t wait to wake up in the morning to work on it. The only way to get there is by the overwhelming and constant efforts you have to put up every single moment.
What is beautiful about this concept is that it helps you build organically an amazing organisation on the way to it. You can’t achieve this huge goal if you don’t build a healthy and profitable organisation first.
How would you know if your BHAG is big enough? By assessing the probability to achieve it. If it is 100%, keep pushing because it is too small, until you reach a probability of 50–70%. Sounds beautifully crazy, right? It challenges you to grow continuously, by default.
The most important traits of a BHAG:
Long-term oriented, spanning more than 10 years, sometimes it can even reach 25 years.
Challenging — it gets the organisation out of its comfort zone;
Unachievable — looking from the outside, it seems impossible;
Innovative — if it hasn’t been done like this so far, you have a long way to work;
Compelling and exciting — we’re not talking about redesigning paper planes here, though this can also be fun;
Tangible, energizing and highly focused: you’ll know right away when you will achieve it and it is so clear that you don’t have to explain it.
Examples of BHAG:
JFK’s challenge to get on the Moon: This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
Microsoft: A computer on every desk and in every home.
SpaceX: Enable human exploration and settlement of Mars.
Google: To provide access to the world’s information in one click.
Volvo: By 2020 no one should be killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo.
Boeing: Become the dominant player in commercial aircraft and bring the world into the jet age.
Giro: Become the Nike of the cycling industry.
The Vision expresses where you will get in a distant future. Whether your now-paper plane will become an actual aircraft or a spaceship sometime.
No matter what your goal is, your activity or domain, you should know where you want to get with that. The most interesting part is that your vision shouldn’t be limited exclusively to your current activity, because it can encompass a wider range of activities.
For example, if you are selling soaps and tea right now, nobody can stop you to aim bigger in your vision regarding your future company: to become the leading local producer of bio self-care articles.
You can see that even if right now you are a seller, but you are planning on becoming a producer, once you get accustomed with the market and you touch a critical mass of clients you can do it. You may also want to become the leading local producer which increases your sales channels and market share, and you may be planning on sitting on a niche: bio self-care products.
What I want to emphasize with this is that the golden rule in building your vision is to aim beyond your current situation.
If you are just at the beginning, you’ve just sold your first product, you can imagine how small your vision should be if you’re referring it to your current situation. Right now, selling even 100 products may seem like the ultimate goal. If you think big, you might get to the point of selling 100k products every month with less and less efforts.
You’re probably using Netflix and you might be inclined to think that their vision is strongly correlated to streaming movies and TV shows worldwide, making it easier for everyone to benefit from some quality entertainment in the comfort of their couch. Well, they are only on their way of accomplishing their much bigger vision: Becoming the best global entertainment distribution service. Licensing entertainment content around the world. Creating markets that are accessible to filmmakers.
Be careful what you wish for, because you might achieve it. If they would only dream of streaming movies, they wouldn’t have worked so hard on creating a company that would be able to accomplish that much bigger vision.
Having a clear vision leaves you room for growth and it helps you prepare for what seems impossible right now. If Netflix would have grown their company having in mind streaming services, it would have been really hard for them to extend their operations and gain the needed experience to be able to add the other activities.
Nike’s vision it’s not to be the leading global sports shoe provider, it’s about intangible benefits: Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. If you have a body, you are an athlete.
If you think about it, since they consider everyone an athlete, it means they address everyone, without discrimination. So if you want some inspiration and innovation (and they live and work by these words), you might buy a pair of sports shoes from them. You’ll feel like an athlete, wearing the greatest shoes for sports, shoes that were created with athletes in mind.
“The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.” Simon Sinek
If you are an IT company, building, let’s say, an e-learning platform, your vision might be: becoming the national leading provider of alternative education, to give access to education to everyone and to enhance and support traditional education.
The way you define your vision becomes the way you do things, beyond technology, which is your main activity. In this situation, you’ll have to make your system really accessible, easy to use and to address a wide range of subjects to reach more clients but you’ll also have to tackle some subjects from the traditional education, and give access to students through schools at a national level.
If your vision sounded something like: To help everyone become a better version of themselves, it seems you’ll go global since there’s no geographic limitation mentioned, and that you’ll also provide a wide range of courses to be able to achieve the particular objectives of your customers, because you promised to help everyone, and everyone is… well, unique.
To be more specific and to tackle the very nature of your service or product, you can mention the area or the domain: To help professionals build the best career. Now you are providing courses for professionals, helping them grow to achieve their career objectives.
How to define your Vision
It becomes this simple to articulate your vision: start from what you’re doing and enhance it. It is not wrong to draw your vision later than day one in business, you’ll be able to gain some experience and to find out what you really want.
There are some elements to outline your Vision:
The impact: You’re gonna touch how many people?
Localisation: You’re gonna play local, regional, national, international, worldwide?
Innovation: Are you going to create something new? Do you want to enhance or improve uniquely something that already exists?
Position: are you going to be the only one that does this? Are you planning on being the first? Are you opening new markets or are you aiming to dominate the existing ones?
Time-frame: When are you going to accomplish this vision?
When formulating your vision, you can answer only some of these questions, because some of them are self-explanatory. We can all bet on Space X’s great chances of being the first ones to go on Mars. If Google wants to provide access to the world’s information in one click, we get clarity on localisation, innovation, position, and impact. As to the time-frame, their focus is on continuously building the system that can organize so much information and they are already giving access to the world’s information.
It all seems so big that it scares you, right? Let’s give you some simple examples that will help you relax.
You’re producing paper and textile bags for shopping. You might believe that you can’t possibly make something big out of this. Well, taking into consideration the new legislation that addresses world climate concerns based on the destructive power of plastic and the plans to abolish it by 2030…
Here’s your window not only to open your stores in every city, but to become the major provider for supermarkets or shops. Suddenly, from the vision that seemed just “selling bio bags”, to “contributing to preserving a sustainable life on our local communities/our planet.”
You might even see the impact of your actions if, let’s say, as a major producer, 80% of people are using your products. Do you see how a major geopolitical change can be in your benefit?Everything sounds great, but one of the most frequent questions I got from my clients while I was helping them with strategic planning was:
If the market changes so fast, wouldn’t we get stuck on our strategic plan? What's the point of doing it when we already know we won’t be able to honour it?
My answer was another question, as unmannerly as it seemed: if we’re all gonna die, what’s the point of doing anything? I paid my apologies, then I added: that’s the beauty of it, we’ll know that having a plan would keep us on the right track, and this plan is so permissive, that you can take as many different roads and play as many games as you want and still get where you dreamed of getting.
The vision doesn’t tell you how you’ll get there, anticipating exactly how many chess moves you have until you succeed. You’re free to play along the way, to lose, to reinvent and to start over something different.
Google’s vision of “providing access to the world’s information in one click” won’t stop them from adapting to market change and technology advancements. On the contrary, they are part of the market change and technology advancement, they’ve become the market.
Now, forget everything you’ve read so far about Vision.
You have every right to be upset, but let me explain. It is easier to imagine a future self or business if you start with your present persona, with the reality at hand.
First, clarify what you are doing, how and for whom. Then, you can start thinking how far you want to get with whom you or your business are right now. While the mission expresses your cause and purpose (why do you exist, what do you do), the vision details your aspiration on how the business will bring impact to be able to pursue that cause. So start from the Mission, you'll find some helpful resources here.
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