370 PLAN Study Guide Bryson, Chapter 8, Establishing an Effective Organizational Vision for the Future Purpose To develop a clear and succinct description of what the organization (or community) should look like as it successfully implements its strategies, achieves its full potential, and creates significant public value. Vision includes mission, but goes well beyond it. Mission outlines the organizational purpose; vision goes on to describe how the organization should look when it is working extremely well in relation to its environment and key stakeholders. Developing visions is more time consuming than formulating mission statements and more difficult. Because so many organizations are coalitional it is useful to think about visions as treaties among rival coalitions. Effective leaders are typically visionary and yet disciplined enough to affirm the vision in the present. [That is one reason why many visions are stated in the present tense in spite of the fact that they describe a desirable future situation.] Bryson believes that it may not be possible to create an effective and compelling vision of success for an organization -- especially the first time through. But he argues that's probably O.K. for most organizations since, in his experience, agreement on strategy is more important than agreement on vision (or goals). Desired Outcomes Then Bryson starts on his "ya buts": "Even though it may not be necessary to have a vision of success in order to improve organizational effectiveness, it is hard to imagine a truly high-performing organization that does not have at least an implicit and widely shared conception of what success looks like and how it might be achieved. Indeed, it is hard to imagine an organization surviving in the long run without some sort of vision to inspire it." A vision statement should probably include the following: A mission statement A statement of the organization's basic philosophy, core values, and cultural features Goals, if established Basic strategies Performance criteria Important decision making rules Ethical standards expected of all employees Note from Dr. Sweeney: In practice, organizations usually try to develop a one sentence vision so statement people, especially within the organization, can remember it. Including in the vision statement itself all the material Bryson
suggests (above) doesn't happen. You will occasionally find this material referred to as sort of a preamble to the vision statement, but it would not appear as part of the statement. The vision should clarify the organization's direction and purpose; be relatively action oriented and future oriented; reflect high ideals and challenging ambitions; and capture the organization's uniqueness and distinctive competence as well as desirable features of its history, culture, and values. And it should also, somehow, be relatively short -- and inspiring. The vision should be widely circulated among organizational members and other key stakeholders. Benefits Fully developed visions provide a "capsule theory" of the organization: what it should do and how it should do it to achieve success by altering the world in some important way. The vision gives organizational members guidance about what is expected of them and why. It helps them see how the organization fits into the big picture. This feature makes visions useful in the implementation of strategy. Since, Bryson argues, conception precedes perception, a vision helps organizational members have some conception of what success and desirable behavior look like before they can actually "see" them. A vision of success makes it easier for people to discriminate between preferred and undesirable actions and outcomes. A vision of success helps not with predicting the future, which we can't do, but with creating it. It provides a way to claim or affirm the future in the present. It outlines the future we want to have and forces us to live it, create it, realize it in the present moment. Visions create a creative tension between what is, current reality replete with all the strategic issues we have identified, and what should be; between what is and what ought to be. A well-crafted vision is motivating because it depicts a future which will be challenging to reach, but possible and believable. A clear vision of success also helps recognize the barriers to attaining it, the first step to overcoming them.