Let me ask you something. If I rang three people in your organisation tomorrow and asked them where you’re all heading, what would they tell me? Would they describe a future they actually care about? Or would they read me the quarterly targets? A plan tells people where to put their feet. A vision is what tells them why the walk is worth doing in the first place.
Flat out, and for what?
Here’s what I see a lot. Organisations are really, really good at planning. Gantt charts, 90-day sprints, KPI dashboards, the lot. And that makes sense. Planning gets rewarded because you can measure it, and it makes everyone feel in control.
Vision is messier. It’s hard to measure and easy to shoot down as “a bit fluffy”. So, a lot of leadership teams stop doing it. They stack up rolling 90-day plans and call that a strategy.
And what happens then? John Kotter warned about this decades ago, and I wrote about it in my book Lead the Future. You end up with a long list of projects that don’t connect. People work harder and harder, and none of it adds up. They feel flat out and kind of pointless at the same time. Have you felt that? I know I have.
You get really good at doing the wrong things faster. And your good people, the ones you most want to keep, start looking around for work that means something.
Now picture the other side. When there’s a real picture of where you’re going, decisions get quicker because people know what they’re aiming at. People find meaning in their work, and that’s one of the biggest drivers of performance there is. And when things go sideways, which they will, a team with a shared vision can take the hit and adjust. If all you’ve got is a plan, it tends to unravel the minute reality stops matching the spreadsheet.
A pile of finished tasks isn’t a building
Think about an architect’s drawings next to a builder’s work order. The work order is super practical. Which wall goes up today, which materials, how many hours. You absolutely need it. But if nobody knows what the finished place is meant to look like, or why it’s worth building, the work order is just a to-do list. You can tick off every task on it and still end up with somewhere nobody wants to live.
So which one are you handing your team?
“I’m not sure I’ve thought about it that way”
I have been working with Richard, the CEO of a mid-sized professional services firm. His organisation has been through three restructures in three years. Each one made sense on paper, and each one was well planned and well run. But each one left people a bit more worn out than the one before.
When I first asked Richard about the vision, he gave me a really fluent answer about market positioning, new service lines and revenue targets. Then I asked him something different. What will this place look and feel like for the people inside it in five years? What will it stand for? What will they be proud of?
He went quiet for a long time. Then he said, “I’m not sure I’ve thought about it that way.”
I really respect him for saying that out loud. That moment kicked off the most important work his leadership team has done together. They didn’t launch another restructure or write another plan. We ran a proper visioning process with the whole team, and honestly, it got messy and uncomfortable at times. But they came out with a picture of the future that people want to move towards.
The change work they’re doing now feels completely different. People understand why it’s happening, and they can see where it’s going.
What 30 years of research keeps telling us
John Kotter’s research on organisational change has been saying the same thing for more than three decades. One of the main reasons transformation efforts fail is that there’s no clear, compelling vision behind them. Without one, you get confusion and a lot of wasted effort. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras found something similar in Built to Last. The companies that kept performing over decades were built around a strong sense of what they stood for and a big, bold long-term goal, not around a plan.
Where does your team sit?
Can your people answer these?
- Where are we going, in one sentence?
- Why does it matter?
- How does my work connect to it?
If the answer to any of these is no, you have a plan. You don’t have a vision yet.
“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.” – Jack Welch
Four ways to start building a real vision
1. Do the three-people test. Ask three people at different levels to tell you, in one sentence, where you’re going and why it matters. If you get three different answers, or three versions of a revenue target, you’ve got a plan. Fair warning, this one can be humbling.
2. Start the conversation before you feel ready. A lot of leaders wait until they’ve got the vision all figured out before they share it. I reckon that’s backwards. Vision comes out of conversation. It’ll be messy, and that’s fine. You don’t need to walk in with the answer. You need to make the space where people can work it out together.
3. Make it mean something for every team. If the vision only lives in the exec team, it’s a nice aspiration and not much more. Every leader needs to translate it for their own people. What does this ask of my team? How does Sam’s work help get us there? That’s a leadership job.
4. Guard your thinking time. The day-to-day will swallow the big-picture thinking every time if you let it. So block out regular time, and protect it, for thinking that has nothing to do with today’s problems. Read outside your industry. Sit with the questions about the future that make you a bit uncomfortable. That’s where vision actually comes from.
Want to go deeper? Vision and foresight are two of the 12 skills I unpack in Lead the Future. Order your copy here: https://intactteams.com/lead-the-future-book/