Strategize Your Vision

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A dynamo CEO and I were meeting for the first time.  As always, when meeting a potential client, I asked her, “What's your organization’s mission?” After pursing her lips and starting at the ceiling for a good ten seconds, she got up, walked over to a  stack of annual reports piled high on an office shelf, and began rummaging…  “I know it’s here somewhere!”

Okay.  To be fair, this was a number of years ago.  Since then most people have caught on that Mission Statements should be short enough for everyone to remember.  So now after I ask my Mission Statement question, I like to ask leaders if they have a Vision, and if so, do they ever get their Vision and Mission mixed up.  At this point we usually share a good laugh and get down to work.

Think about it.  Can you answer the Vision / Mission question for your organization?  And, as importantly, do you think your CEO, Board Chair, and colleagues would answer similarly?

If not, it's not your fault!  

Nonprofits have been replicating one another’s hand-me-down “best practices” for so long they don’t even realize many have lost their utility.

The solution for you (and all non-profits):  Drop the ingrained Vision/Mission habit, and instead ask the following six questions to design a Shared Strategic Vision that will map out your social-profit’s core business on a single page.

The 6 Questions:

  1. What is your Mission?
  2. Who are your Primary Beneficiaries?
  3. Who are your Essential Partners?
  4. What are your Intended Results?
  5. What are your Core Strategies?
  6. What are your Core Practices?

This isn't a branding or marketing exercise.  These questions have been designed to help you and your team discuss, decide, and clarify what everyone needs to know to inspire innovative thinking and make well informed, strategic decisions on your organization’s behalf –– even when they are all alone, and there's no one around to ask.  

To tie up my story of the dynamo CEO in search of her vision, yes, she finally found the annual report that held it.  It consisted of two eminently forgettable paragraphs.  Luckily, her organization had come up with a great tagline a few months earlier (that she did remember), and within 20 minutes we managed to turn it into a succinct Mission statement that significantly influenced the Shared Strategic Vision work that followed, which in turn profoundly influenced their board and staff members' approach to programming decisions.  Design Thinking works.