What do we want to accomplish?
The destination or ultimate purpose.
How do we want to accomplish it?
The important goals and capabilities needed to achieve the vision.
Objectives are measurable steps on the way to those goals, they are targets that you must meet to achieve the goals. Objectives need to be measurable, so you have to decide what to measure, how to measure and how accurately to measure. Tasks are the work you have to do to achieve these objectives.
So, a vision is not a detailed blueprint, it’s a direction, a combination of what you want and what you value. From this vision you naturally set your goals. Goals are dreams with deadlines.
From the goals come a number of measurable, smaller objectives.
Also, to achieve your purpose you will need certain qualities, and your values will guide the whole journey.
Vision
A vision answers significant questions, those that can only be answered by action:
What do I want to accomplish in my life?
What do I want to look back on having achieved?
If there were one great task I could accomplish immediately, as if by magic, what would it be?
What have I always wanted to do – that nagging thought that seems grandiose but will not go away?
What am I drawn towards doing?
These questions can give you the main purpose of your journey.
Leaders start with the vision that they think is achievable and worthwhile.
A fully elaborated and worked out and carefully worded vision is often called a ‘mission statement’. To refine the vision into a mission statement you have to ask some critical questions, whether you are developing an organizational mission or a personal one:
Where are we going?
How will we get there?
What do we need to succeed?
What are our guiding values?
What will we measure for success and how will we measure it?
How long will it take?
Once you believe your vision to be achievable and practical, once you have your road map, you need to share it. How do you do this? You can write it down, you can talk to others, but the most powerful way of all is to live it and the values it embodies. Action can express a vision much better than words. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American essayist and poet, put it this way: ‘What you are doing speaks so loud I can’t hear what you say.’ People will always judge you first on what you do, then by what you say. Artists, designers and musicians all lead mainly by what they do.
To fully use your vision and share it with others you will at some point, however, have to find words that capture it in a clear and inspiring way. Inevitably the words will be less inspiring and your vision may lose force and be misunderstood. The world of pictures is evocative and lucid, the world of words is shadowy and full of double meanings. Sight takes in everything all at once, words give a little at a time. Try this experiment when you have a few moments to yourself. Look at your surroundings for a few seconds. Then close your eyes. Now describe your surroundings. It would take a long time, wouldn’t it? But someone who knew the scene would recognize it from your first sketchy description. A vision statement in words has little meaning unless it can connect with and evoke the experience it refers to.
More difficult still, unlike your surroundings, a vision does not yet exist, it is an imaginary picture, like the form of a sculpture that only exists in your mind’s eye. It becomes solid only as you work towards it. At first it’s an outline. An evocative word sketch will allow people to create it in their own minds, to see it in their own terms. Then they will add to it, give it different perspectives and the vision will grow stronger. The more people share the essential vision, the more robust and multi-dimensional it becomes.
There is an art to putting a vision into words. The words need to be clear enough to capture the idea, yet vague enough for others to make their own meanings from it and enrich it. ‘To put a man on the moon in 10 years’ is one example of a vision. ‘A family growing and being happy together’ is another. ‘A reliable overnight delivery service’ is a third. How about ‘Redefining what is possible in the media market’? The words need to be suggestive and evocative. To modify Einstein’s famous dictum, ‘Vision needs to be as simple as possible, but no simpler.’
I think it is natural to have a vision. It may be clear and central in your life. It may be hovering on the edge of your horizon – you may have a peripheral vision, as it were. Leadership takes that vision and puts it more fully into your life. You become more aware of it and start to act on it.
A vision can be about creating an international company, playing a leading role in your local community, being an inspiring manager, a top athletic coach, designing a killer software application, building a high-performance team or launching a new business project. It comes down to a simple question: what’s worth doing?
Another question is, how long will the journey take? This depends on what you want to accomplish. Too short a journey and people are not stretched. They will not be interested if the end goal is too easy – no one needs a leader for an expedition to the corner shop. Too long a journey and there is too much tension – people will not even try, if the goal seems impossible. A leader skilfully stretches the distance just far enough to set up the right tension, but not far enough to strain or snap the link between the present and the future.
Suppose the journey has to be a long one? No business goes from sinking to soaring in less than a couple of years and if your vision is social change, that can take decades. The larger and more pervasive the change, the longer it takes. A long journey must embody something very important and be truly compelling for people to sign up. Alternatively, present conditions have to be very bad to get people moving. The leader must break a long journey into stages so it looks more manageable. No one climbs a mountain in one unbroken expedition, they welcome the resting points on the way to the top. The higher the mountain, the more breaks there are and the more comfortable they will be. Imagine looking up at a huge mountain and knowing you have to climb it in one trek. Your heart will sink to the bottom of your mountain boots. There have to be intermediate goals along the way or no one will even want to start in the first place. The leader will be left marching off into the distance on their own.
Exploring Mental Perspectives I: Vision
It seems natural to represent time as distance in our minds. We talk of events ‘far in the future’ or ‘close to the present’ and the law of perspective operates in our minds as well as in the outside world. The longer a goal takes to achieve, the further away we represent it, and the further away, the smaller it seems. The smaller it seems, the less motivating and the less real it may feel, so why bother to start? Perspective is governed by an inverse square law. In other words, if you retreat to twice the distance from
