Many a team struggles to come up with a vision statement that accurately, succinctly and inspirationally captures where they want to go. Over the years I’ve personally spent hours with my team wordsmithing a sentence or two that articulates our future goals. And I always felt we sacrificed some meaning for the sake of brevity.
Well, a recent experience with a client revealed what I think is a better way to create your vision. My partner and I created a template for a broader vision narrative and together we created a vision story with this team. It included the context, the challenges, the opportunities, the actions: all the elements essential to knowing where you want to go and how you’ll get there. Invariably, some of these are left out of a succinct vision statement.
And instead of this team nitpicking over the few perfect words, they enthusiastically debated and discussed their broader story and came up with a great narrative. They not only have a clear vision now, they have a story they can go tell the people in their organizations to educate, align and inspire them.
Does this mean you don’t need a vision statement? No. In fact, it makes it easier to create that pithy statement when you can pull from the more detailed story.
My recommendation: start broader and be more detailed. Tell a comprehensive story about your aspirational goals. It makes it much easier to then tell everyone else.