Lots of people confuse mission with vision. Both are incredibly important. But while mission and vision are close cousins, they play different roles when it comes to innovation and leadership.
A mission statement explains why your church, nonprofit, or company exists. It clarifies what you’re aiming at without much detail. It’s a laserlike description of your ultimate goal. It describes the bull’s-eye.
Vision is much more detailed. It’s the narrative that describes what success is supposed to look like in detailed and real-life terms. It puts flesh on your missional bones.
If you have a clear mission statement but no corresponding detailed vision of what success looks like or how you plan to get there, the result will almost always be a confused and splintered team. Each member will seek to fulfill the mission in their own way, taking the path that seems best to them.
If you have a detailed vision without a clear mission statement, the result will almost always be lots of activity without any means of determining whether it’s accomplishing anything. At the end of the day, there will be no way to measure success.
We’ve already seen in an earlier chapter the power of a clear mission statement to accelerate the innovation process. In this chapter, we’ll look at why clear and compelling vision is so important and how it’s developed.
Unlike mission, vision often starts out fuzzy. It’s a lot like an old-fashioned Polaroid picture; it becomes sharper and more focused over time. It can’t be rushed. But if allowed to fully develop, it provides a clear and detailed description of what success looks like.
Once that happens, it becomes increasingly obvious which new ideas are merely novel and which ones have the potential to advance the cause. It makes many otherwise difficult leadership decisions a snap.
Vision also tends to expand over time. It becomes broader and more nuanced.
For instance, at North Coast Church, our mission is “Making Disciples in a Healthy Church Environment.” Our original description of what that looked like included a vision of having at least 80 percent of our adult worship attendance meeting in a weekly small group. Later we expanded our vision with more details. We imagined our small groups taking the weekend sermon and digging deeper into the main topic. Still later we included a community-service component, casting a vision of each group taking on multiple service projects throughout the year.
This is just one example of the many areas where our vision has developed over time even though our mission has remained exactly the same.
So how does this thing called vision develop? What can we do to find, clarify, recalibrate, and communicate it in a way that makes a difference? Here are six things you’ll want to keep in mind. They describe what it takes to move from mission to vision to reality.
1. YOU ALREADY HAVE A VISION
Sometimes leaders tell me they have no vision. But they’re wrong. They always have a vision. It may be ill-defined, uncertain, or deeply buried. But it’s there, even if only in nascent form. It always is.
Perhaps you’ve experienced something similar to the following conversation.
“Where do you want to go for lunch?”
“I don’t care. Anywhere.”
“How about McDonald’s?”
“I guess I do care. Anywhere but there.”
It’s not until someone suggests a specific place, in this case McDonald’s, that most of us realize that we actually do have a vision for lunch. It’s not crystal clear. It’s simply anywhere but McDonald’s. But let someone suggest another place, perhaps Wendy’s, and we realize it’s even more specific: anything but fast food.
Getting in touch with our vision often starts with the extremes of what we dislike most and what we desire most. One of the easiest ways to uncover your vision is to ask yourself what are the things in your church, nonprofit, or company that you feel best about, and what are the things that cause you to feel most embarrassed or discouraged.
If you don’t know where to start, start with what you don’t want. It’s often easier to get in touch with what we don’t want than with what we want. Describe it in detail.
I’ve found that highly influential and innovative leaders almost always have a vision grounded in a unique combination of the worst and best experiences from their past. They dream of creating a place that proves that their bad experiences need not have happened, and a place where their best experiences are duplicated.
The most important thing about your vision is to make sure that it’s an honest reflection of what you’re passionate about and what you want to see take place. It has to be real. It can’t be mere political correctness or a generic definition of success in your industry. Political correctness and marketing clichés aren’t vision. They can’t set you apart or get you in touch with your calling.
2. VISION EVOLVES
As we’ve already seen, vision evolves. It seldom pops out fully developed. It most often begins as a sense of direction. Then later, it becomes a specific plan. Finally, it ends up as a destination, though the final destination is often quite different from what we expected when the journey began.
Consider the famous expedition of Lewis and Clark. In many ways it’s a perfect illustration of how vision evolves.
They started out with a crystal clear sense of direction. They were headed toward the Pacific Ocean in search of a northwest passage suitable for commerce. They laid out a plan to get there. But their plan changed almost daily in light of the shifting realities they experienced along the way. By the time they had reached their destination, the Pacific Ocean, they were no longer charting a river-based passage suitable for commerce. They’d already established that it didn’t even exist. Instead, they were compiling a treasure trove of scientific and geographical discoveries that would pave the way for future exploration.
In the same way, successful and innovative leaders tend to start out with a destination in mind and head off toward it. But changing realities tend to mess up their plans. So they continually adjust, taking a slightly different route, refining their vision as they go along. At the end of the day, they present us with a gift called Oregon.
The fact is, most successful and innovative leaders don’t control their destiny. They ride it out. They start with a vision and a goal and then follow it wherever it takes them. And it often takes them to places they didn’t know existed when they started out.
3. VISION COMES FROM WITHIN
A compelling vision comes from within. When leaders develop their vision by looking out the window to see what everyone else is doing, they don’t end up with a vision. They end up with a poor imitation of someone else’s vision.
A God-given vision will always be unique, simply because every leader and every organization is unique. That’s not to say you have to be radically different. It is to say that you have to be you.
To make sure your vision is aligned with your uniqueness as well as with that of your organization and the situation you find yourself in, it’s helpful to ask a couple of questions.
The first question is, “Who is our leader?”
No vision can succeed without a strong alignment with the gifts, skills, and passion of the directional leader. That’s why vision almost always starts with the directional leader. It can and should be adjusted and fine-tuned by others, but if it starts elsewhere or fails to honestly align with the leader’s gifts, skills, and passion, it has little chance of succeeding. It’s a recipe for dysfunction, a short tenure, and an abundance of conflict.
The second question is, “Who are we?”
Just as no vision can succeed if it’s misaligned with the leader, the same holds true for a leadership team. That’s why it’s important to honestly assess the gifts, skills, and passion of the team. They don’t have to match the leader’s exactly. In fact, most often, they shouldn’t. But they need to be complementary. Their passion must flow in the same channel as the directional leader’s or it won’t be long until the leader, the leadership team, or the vision goes through some painful transitions.
4. VISION CLARIFIES PRIORITIES
Every organization has more opportunities than time, money, and energy to pursue them. That’s where vision comes in. The clearer and more detailed our vision, the more obvious it will be which opportunities and new ideas ought to be pursued and which ones should be ignored.
This is one of the most important benefits of a clear and detailed vision.
Without a clear set of priorities, anything that brings in more people or money ends up looking like a great opportunity. But some things that bring in a temporary infusion of attendees, customers, or money aren’t great opportunities. They’re detours, undercutting and sabotaging our mission and vision.
For instance, a rush of customers you can’t serve well will set you back. Those who have a bad experience will most likely be lost forever. It’s certain that they will tell others about their negative experiences. Even if it puts some extra dollars in your pocket, in the long run, the results will be the same as if you had unintentionally purchased a batch of negative advertising.
I remember a friend who was a sucker for every new program that seemed to work elsewhere. He’d go to check it out and bring it back home. Though it often resulted in a temporary spike in attendance, it was always followed by a return to the previous norm. It never dawned on him that he was cannibalizing his vision or that the word on the street had become “I used to go there.”
A clearly articulated vision keeps that from happening. It sets priorities that make it obvious when a so-called golden opportunity is in reality just a dangerous temptation.
5. VISION MATCHES REALITY
Leaders often assume that once they’ve figured out what they’re supposed to do, they should do it immediately. But that’s a big mistake. Wise leadership is not the art of the ideal. It’s the art of the possible.
Imagine a general deciding that since the textbook battle plan always takes the high ground, he’s going to storm the three hills surrounding the battleground, even though he has only enough soldiers and firepower to take two of them.
We’d consider him a fool. Dividing his troops and attacking all three hills at once would leave him with no hills conquered, lots of dead soldiers, and a reputation for snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory.
Yet that’s exactly what many leaders and leadership teams do. They pursue the ideal no matter what the reality is. Once they see a hill that needs to be taken, they charge off to take it, even if they don’t yet have the resources to win the battle.
Successful leaders and leadership teams don’t go off half-cocked. They are realists. They’re brutally honest with themselves. They don’t try to do what they can’t do. They know their strengths and weaknesses. They start with the low-hanging fruit they can reach before searching for a ladder to pick the tough stuff that’s far out of reach.
They also tend to move forward at a steady but unrushed pace. They are more like a glacier than an avalanche. They embody the adage that we all tend to greatly overestimate what we can do in one year, and greatly underestimate what we can do in five.
An avalanche looks impressive. It’s powerful, pushing lots of stuff down the hill. It knocks over and buries anything in its way. But come back a few years later and you’ll be hard pressed to find any evidence that it did anything.
A glacier doesn’t look like it’s doing much. But it is. It’s moving slowly and powerfully in one direction. Nothing stops it. And thousands of years later, it has carved out a Yosemite.
6. VISION SELDOM COMES OUT OF A COMMITTEE MEETING
As we saw in an earlier chapter, groupthink is one of innovation’s worst enemies. It’s also one of vision’s worst enemies.
A realistic vision has to align with the passions, skills, and strengths of the leadership team and those who operate the organization. But it also almost always has to flow out of the heart of the leader. It seldom (if ever) comes out of a committee meeting.
There are many ways to design a house. But someone has to take on the role of head architect. You can’t take a vote on each room. If you do, you’ll end up with something resembling the Winchester House.15
That’s not to say that the best and most innovative leaders act in isolation. It’s simply to say that they don’t take a poll or a vote when developing their vision. They typically work with a very small and tight-knit group.
Think of the way Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, and Tim Cook worked together at Apple. Jobs was the unquestioned leader. He didn’t take straw polls or turn to focus groups. He looked within, designing products that he personally wanted to use. But he did listen carefully to both Ive and Cook, often adjusting his vision to what they saw and suggested. The result was some of the most groundbreaking and innovative products of the day.
Over the years, I’ve found that the best visionaries and innovators in nearly every field lead and innovate in much the same way. Whether they are leading a church, a nonprofit, or a company, they seldom act alone. And they often have a cord of three.
But they never have a committee.