How Good Is Your Vision?
Almost all companies have a vision, but it isn't always designed effectively to fulfill its purpose. Here's how to test and improve yours.
As Seneca said, “If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.” Your vision is the port toward which you are headed. It is the north star from which everything derives. Objectives, features, key results: they all should derive from the vision and further your progress towards it.
“If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.”
This seems uncontroversial. Indeed, great leaders are lauded as “visionary.” And a great vision will help a lot! It will motivate your staff to work towards ambitious goals, make them focused and autonomous by empowering them to make day-to-day decisions and improve both productivity and happiness in your organization. However, in my experience, many—if not most—companies' visions are sub-par and, therefore, fail to yield all these benefits.
What does a good vision look like?
A vision should have four properties, which we'll go into detail about in the following sections:
Contradictability: it should be possible to argue the opposite
Prescriptiveness: what the company should and shouldn't be doing should naturally derive from the vision
Descriptiveness: reading it should make it possible for an outsider to get a good image of what the company will be if it attains its vision
Awesomeness: it should be inspiring and motivating
There's a fifth one, which is a bit of a bonus:
Non-triviality: to an outsider, your vision might sound weird or even bad
Let's dig deeper into each one of these.
1. Contradictability
This is a non-intuitive one, I'll grant you. Why should it be possible to argue the opposite of the vision? Well, if it's impossible to argue the opposite, your vision is trivial and, therefore, meaningless.
Such visions are often qualitative statements: “We want to be the best XYZ,” “We want to delight our users,” and so on. The problem is that nobody sets out to be the worst in whatever they do or even to be the second best. Everybody wants to be the best, so such a vision isn't helpful.
Think, however, about Apple and Linux. Both companies had the same idea of a world where everyone would have a computer. But they went about it in wildly different ways. Their visions could have been¹:
Linux: we will make it possible for anyone to configure their operating system to their desires, at no cost
Apple: we will make it possible for anyone to have a great computer that works out of the box, with no fiddling required
In this example, Apple's and Linux's visions are almost opposite, but both work; however, they will dictate wildly different priorities for the companies holding them.
That brings us to the second property, Prescriptiveness.
2. Prescriptiveness
A good vision should prescribe what a company should and—I would argue, more importantly—shouldn't do. If the vision fails to do that, it will not help align the staff toward a common goal.
A company I had consulted for in the past had as their long-term vision to “Become a super-app.” Now, ask yourself: what does a super-app not do? Well, by definition, not much. A super-app should do almost everything; that's the whole point. But if everything needs to be done, there is no way to know how to prioritize the infinite number of items the backlog is bound to contain. The company will work on random items, failing to leverage synergies between them and creating a bewildering product overall. Or, worse, it will remain stuck in analysis paralysis, much like Esther facing the fig tree in The Bell Jar².
But take Linux's hypothetic vision above: “We will make it possible for anyone to configure their operating system to their desires, at no cost.” This prescribes a lot. It means you will not deal with hardware, for one. It also means that you will focus on creating a robust and open software platform that anyone can toy with instead of polishing any particular aspect. On the other hand, Apple doesn't care about openness since it would undermine the usability of their devices, so they created a closed ecosystem where they could polish all aspects of the user experience.
Which of these visions is better? There isn't one! Both projects successfully put millions of computers in service, but in very different ways.
But for the vision to be clear and vivid in all of your staff's minds, it cannot just be prescriptive; it must tell a story and be descriptive.
3. Descriptiveness
One key value of a good vision is that it provides autonomy to your staff. If it's obvious to everyone where the company is headed, they will be able to make good decisions when at a crossroads. On the other hand, if they don't know where the company needs to go, they will have to ask for guidance, be micro-managed, or pick what suits them best, at the risk of leading the company in the wrong direction.
The vision should be vivid to avoid this. After reading it, an outsider should be able to describe accurately what your company will be doing in the future. Staff inside the company should be able to paint very similar pictures if asked what they believe the company should be like.
Take the “Super-app” example above. I asked various product managers in the company what they thought the company's next big bet should be. The answers spanned industries, business models, and target audiences. Indeed, they revealed much more about the individuals I was talking to than the company.
It is critical for staff to have a similar picture of the company's direction, lest they move in different directions and the company's productivity suffers. But what they describe also matters: it should be something grand, which leads us to our fourth quality: awesomeness.
4. Awesomeness
Another great benefit of a good vision is motivation. Employees pursuing a vision they believe in will be able to move mountains. Employees working on something they don't believe in or that isn't that compelling will not. A custodian for the Appollo program once said, “I'm not mopping floors; I'm putting a man on the moon.”³ What may seem menial was transformed into something compelling by the vision, the goal everyone worked towards, including the custodian.
A good vision should send chills down your spine; it should be something you are proud to talk about at a party. “Increasing our sales by 10%” is unlikely to have this effect.
It is noteworthy that no vision will enthrall everyone. That’s fine: you’re not building for everyone. Your vision should also guide your recruitment: surround yourself with those who sincerely believe in it.
Bonus: Non-triviality
Finally, I would add a final property that might also be counterintuitive: your vision should sound weird or even dumb when first encountered by an outsider. I will admit that this one is a bonus rather than a strict requirement.
I have written about this at greater length before, but here is a summary. Suppose your vision is obviously valid even to people outside of your industry. In that case, chances are that everyone will already be working on it or that there is an easily identifiable flaw with it that you're overlooking.
Many successful companies have products that initially sounded ridiculous. The iPhone was mocked when it was released, and with reason: it was, according to some objective factors, inferior to other phones of the time. After all, you couldn't toss it across a room like a Nokia 3330, nor would it last for two weeks on a single charge! How bad! But of course, the iPhone wasn't playing the same game, and those criteria turned out to be irrelevant to the world it helped usher.
Justin.tv pivoted from being a general streaming site to just doing video games. You may not recall what justin.tv was, but you know the name of their video-game-only streaming service: Twitch. That was a bewildering decision at the time: surely streaming everything is better than streaming just one kind of content? Well, Amazon acquired Twitch for close to a billion dollars, and the Justin.tv URL isn’t reachable anymore.
Now, I say this one is a bonus for obvious reasons: most dumb-sounding things are… well, dumb. It would be a bad idea to be confident in the success of an idea just because everyone else thinks it's stupid. However, if you have strong support for the fact that it is, in fact, a good path to follow, and others think it's terrible, you might have a winner.
Wrapping up
If you have a vision, assess it against these five properties. How well do you fare? Try to identify the areas you are lacking and reformulate accordingly. If you're planning a new business, keep those in mind, and be very careful if you end up with a vision lacking in one of these aspects.
As is the case for every other business tool, having a vision that passes all of these tests with flying colors is no guarantee of success. However, I hope this piece clarifies how not meeting these criteria can be damaging.
¹ To be clear, this is an illustration, not a vision that Apple or Linux had. Also, I realize that we are not exactly comparing… well apples to apples, but bear with me
² Esther imagines her life as sitting in front of a fig tree, ripe with figs representing her different futures. But as she fails to decide which one to take, the figs go bad and fall from the tree. Read the quote here
