Planting the Flag – The Power of Vision

If I asked a random member of your organization to state the goals of the organization for this year, could he or she do it? Could they name even one goal? What if I asked "how does what you're doing today advance a strategic goal of the company?" If their answer is "I don't know" or, even worse, "I don't care," we have a problem. Not a problem that will keep you from being good, but one that can prevent your organization from being truly great. What is lacking is a Vision.

Architecture of a Vision

So what do I mean by a Vision, and why does it matter? I'm not talking about a mission statement, I'm talking about a goal…but it's more than that. To be effective, a Vision should have the following characteristics:

SIMPLE

"Any fool can make things bigger, more complex... It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of courage-to move in the opposite direction."  - Albert Einstein

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." - Leonardo da Vinci

A great Vision statement should be clear and simple. You shouldn't have to be an industry insider, or a senior executive, to decipher it. So we don't want a statement such as "Develop, deploy, and manage a diverse set of scalable and strategic knowledge management tools to serve our customers, improving the possibility of overall satisfaction among our diverse customer profiles." There's a lot wrong with that one, not the least of which is it's not simple. How many tools do we need to deploy to be successful? What does it mean to "improve the possibility of overall satisfaction"? Is it enough that it's possible that our "customer profiles" will be more satisfied, even if they're not actually more satisfied? As an employee, would you be able to tell when you had achieved the goal?

MEASURABLE

"The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror." - Hans-Georg Gadamer

Effective Vision statements describe a goal that can be measured. We can tell objectively whether or not it has been achieved. They should also have a deadline or target date. Open-ended, nebulous statements with, at best, subjective success criteria make it impossible to tell whether or not the organization has achieved the vision. Here's a good example of an immeasurable vision statement: "To experience the joy of advancing and applying technology for the benefit of the public." Simple, yes…but measurable? How would you measure the "joy" of a company? And the goal is to "experience the joy"…so if we experience it, and don't sell much product, have we achieved the goal?

INSPIRATIONAL

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood..." - Daniel Burnham

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." - Henry David Thoreau

Bold, inspirational Visions move people and organizations to push the envelope. Some of the very best ones set goals that may even seem somewhat impossible at the time they are presented. In 1987, Apple produced this video illustrating their vision of what computing in 2010 could be. It is a concept called the "Knowledge Navigator," a tablet-type device presenting amazing power for the user to interact with the device through speech recognition, research data from multiple sources through an integrated multimedia search engine, simultaneously accept and make voice and video calls, manage appointment calendars, etc.. To put this vision in perspective, 1987 brought us the following advances in computing: Windows 2.0, the introduction of Microsoft Works, and the creation of VGA. To say the Knowledge Navigator seemed "somewhat impossible" in 1987 is probably an understatement, but what do we have in 2010? We have high speed wireless internet, cloud computing, and the iPad.

The Connection in Agile

So how do we tap into the power of a Vision in Agile practices? Once we have a leader who establishes the simple, measurable, inspirational Vision, try creating a "Vision Backlog"…analogous to a Product Backlog, a Vision Backlog can be created and revisited quarterly or annual basis by senior management, and contain the same elements as a product backlog item: the clear statement of the goal, acceptance criteria so everyone knows how to tell when that goal is met, and effort sizing to measure how much effort each item will take to complete, relative to the others. A Vision Backlog could have even just two or three items in it. Then, we can tie product backlog items to vision backlog items, assuring the product features we build serve a strategic vision of the organization. Break those product backlog items down into tasks and hours for a sprint, and you have a chain of evidence from the task to product backlog item to vision backlog item of how much work, and time, it takes to realize that vision.

The Perfect Vision

I have given a few examples of Vision statements that are sub-par. So has there been a "perfect" vision statement? On this 50^th anniversary month of John F. Kennedy's inauguration, I would say he takes the award for the most perfect Vision statement in at least the last 100 years:

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." – John F. Kennedy, May 25^th, 1961

The statement is simple. Everyone in the world could understand what it meant.
The statement is measurable. It's very clear that if we landed one man on the moon, and returned him safely to Earth, before January 1, 1970, that the goal would be met.
The statement is inspirational. It's hard to imagine a more impossible, incredible goal than flying a human safely to another heavenly body for the first time in history.

Yet ordinary people followed that vision, that "castle" that JFK built in the air. They put the foundation under it, planted the flag on lunar soil, and achieved the goal.

Bravo, Mr. President. Bravo.