Aligning vision, strategy, and tactics

The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet nothwithstanding, go out to meet it. - Thucydides

I have been involved in countless endeavors which required fundamental changes to their direction, positioning, or purpose. Such changes are rarely quick, easy, or successful the first time they are attempted. The reasons for this are many and varied: understanding the details of such changes is itself an incremental discovery process; the underlying cultures may actively resist changes to varying degrees; the triggers shaping dynamics are often complex and not sufficiently understood; and because communications about the compelling drivers for such changes are often watered down by abstractions, hedges, and distrust. The net result is to increase anxiety and delay, rather than motivate and accelerate, those who must make the desired changes happen.

When I have seen such changes implemented successfully, it has usually been because the process of change management was performed in a disciplined manner. For this to be successful, such efforts employ a tiered system of vision, strategy, and tactics which are defined, maintained, and progressively elaborated across the affected areas of responsibility over time. The direction and scope of this information provide a consistent basis for planning, integration, and accountability across all these organizations.

Although this idea is frequently (and sometimes comically) attempted within many business contexts, in my experience, it is rarely done well. I believe one reason for this is that the underlying concepts and associated quality criteria that would make this information useful are themselves poorly understood and executed. This note attempts to establish a unified perspective on these elements, and to improve the understanding of their interrelationships, and thus enhance the ability to execute such an approach.

Mission

An organization’s mission should communicate the fundamental purpose for that entity’s existence, and the desired level of performance which the organization must achieve to be successful, both in the present and the future. As such, a mission should address:

1. The scope of the business

2. The unique characteristics which differentiate the business from alternatives which its customers may choose

3. The values which the business treasures above all others

An extensive summary of corporate mission statements can be found here. Some of my favorites are:

• Amazon.com: Be earth’s most customer-centric company; a place where people can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.

• Dell: Listen to customers and deliver innovative technology and services they trust and value.

• eBay: Pioneer communities built on commerce, sustained by trust, and inspired by opportunity.

• Facebook: Help people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family, and coworkers, through technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, and the digital mapping of people’s real-world social connections.

Vision

Visions are distinct from missions, though the two concepts often are often used interchangeably. Visions should be statements of what the organization and its customers aspire to be in the future. The progression to this visionary state from the organization’s current execution of its mission should represent a credible transition over time; otherwise, the business purpose of the organization would not be sustainable as this vision is pursued. Chet Richards characterizes a vision’s key properties:

What is needed is a vision rooted in human nature so noble, so attractive that it not only attracts the uncommitted and magnifies the spirit and strength of its adherents but also undermines the dedication and determination of any competitors or adversaries. Moreover, such a unifying notion should be so compelling that it acts as a catalyst or beacon around which to evolve those qualities that permit a collective entity or organic whole to improve its stature in the scheme of things.

To be effective across a long-term time horizon, a vision should meet all of the following criteria:

1. The vision should communicate a vivid, verifiable future state, in engaging language, and represent the best collective outcome for all stakeholders.

2. The vision should be concise, attention-grabbing, and inspirational.

3. The vision should express tangible and realistic aspirations.

4. The vision should communicate helpful information to guide those involved in planning and implementing the required transformations

5. The vision should enable decision-making and selection of the best possible strategies for the organization over time.

Richards has described the classic pitfall which arises in expressing ‘the vision thing’:

What you typically find in this situation, as we have all seen, is the vision statement that says nothing (We want to be the best.) or worse, collects a grab bag of trite cliches in one convenient location (We aspire to empower all our people to achieve their personal goals, while delivering the greatest value proposition to our customers.) My experience suggests that the reason many companies find it so hard to write vision statements that work is that they have no vision that employees or customers find compelling.

While an organization’s vision should be synthesized from many diverse inputs, it must ultimately emerge from the organization’s leadership and the direction they chose to take the organization over time. Here are some classic vision statements that have shaped the world we live in:

• Land a man on the moon and safely return him to earth by the end of this decade (NASA)

• Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful (Google)

• Contribute to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind (Apple)

• A personal computer in every home running our software (Microsoft)

Strategies

Strategies are the means of pursuing the organization’s vision across multiple planning cycles. Such strategies are discussed in more detail here. Such strategies should be built from many different sources and perspectives, though the collection of chosen strategies ultimately must be integrated, made coherent, and demonstrate utility in guide multi-year planning efforts. Too often, strategies are instead fuzzy, fluffy, or just restatements of goals as objectives. Instead, the key characteristics of an effective set of strategies provide:

• An explanation of the challenges which the organization must overcome, with a focus on the most critical elements.

• A crisp and coherent description of the overall approach that will be taken to confront these challenges, with particular attention on the choices that have been made, and a rationale behind these decisions.

• The specific steps that must be performed and orchestrated to support the selected approach.

Tactics

Tactics are the collection of actions which, when supplied with an appropriate allocation of resources, will achieve the desired strategic changes, and maximize the value realized by these investments over time. Individual tactics are typically associated with objectives, which document specific, intermediate outcomes that are intentionally being pursued over some period of performance. As these objectives are accomplished, the associated resources can then be reallocated to the pursuit of other objectives. These outcomes should be sufficiently detailed so that the duration and level of resources can be properly estimated and planned by the affected organizations.

Richards is again spot on about the common pitfalls of both strategies and tactics:

Because the future is unpredictable, a strategy can only be built from intentions: Given where you are now and where you think you want to go, now, what can you do, now, to help you get there?

A strategy is not a fact, or a forecast, or a schedule, or a roadmap to the future. Is a strategy, then, a type of plan? The two concepts are often confused, since plans deal with the future and so does strategy. We could regard strategy as simply an offshoot of planning... However, as Scottish poet Robert Burns observed about the best laid ones of mice and men, plans are poor tools for dealing with uncertainty, ambiguity, and confusion -what distinguishes real business from business on paper.

The development of effective visions and strategies can generally only be crafted through patient, iterative, reflective considerations, and focused effort. Too often, vision and strategy updates instead are annual, last-minute exercises that are given little thought in advance, and they are set aside for most of the rest of the year in the face of urgent but less important priorities. They then are often not re-examined until the next annual cycle, or when convenient for demonstrating that something is being done. While the use of strategic planning frameworks can be quite effective, these frameworks are not goals unto themselves but are a means to certain ends. These ends will only be achieved if adequate attention is put into developing the underlying concepts, routing around known and discovered roadblocks, and aligning the strategies with behaviors and investments across the landscape they are relevant to.

As Richards warns, I’ve seen the expressions of vision and strategy become entrapped by rushed judgment, lukewarm consensus language, and ambiguous intentions. The resulting visions and strategies end up being expressed as buzzwords that don’t facilitate the required decision-making or tradeoffs and do not enable effective planning to be performed by independent actors over longer-term horizons. Effective strategic planning should instead provide clear direction across the landscape, connecting and coordinating teamwork across agents, and balancing risk, opportunities, and benefits over time.

Execution

Each of these elements - missions, visions, and strategies - have at their core the development and effective communications of abstract ideas, which are typically expressed in relatively short, prose statements. Once consensus is achieved on these statements, only half the battle has been achieved. Rummler and Brache put their finger on the critical, and challenging work going forward from that point:

In our experience, the majority of the strategies that have never come to successful fruition have failed not because they lack a clear, viable vision; rather, they are gathering dust because they have been poorly implemented. Even the best strategies do not spontaneously guide performance. Comprehensive actions to implement a strategy must be planned, carried out, and monitored. Moreover, no matter how talented and hardworking they may be, top managers cannot implement a strategy by themselves.

The test of clarity of a vision and strategies can thus be accomplished by putting them to use in regular cycles of alignment and focus. Such cycles of verification are to be accomplished early and often - and refined by incorporating feedback received - in order to converge on material that will be effective in steering an organization towards winds and currents that are favorable to all stakeholders.