How to form a vision we all align to
When I think of an aligned organisation I think of one which has all of its parts in operating in cohesion towards a shared vision of the future. The opportunity that alignment offers is in maximising effort towards a common future state without wasting effort towards the inessential; in effect ensuring an organisation is at its most competitive.
The enduring challenge has been that organisations struggle with painting a vision that is both inspiring and, importantly, well understood across all of its employees. In this post, we will focus on how we might make a vision ‘well understood’.
The shared understanding of a vision can be a challenge for a variety of reasons:
- Diversity in what is expected from a vision — what employees are looking for from what they might describe as a vision can differ substantially.
- Defining and sharing a vision is difficult — achieving a common understanding of a single idea is challenging; the synthesis of the sum total of an organisation’s aspirations, moreso.
Diversity in what is expected from a vision
At Seek Asia, we surveyed our teams regularly using tools such as CultureAmp and OfficeVibe. ‘Vision’ was a common opportunity area for improvement and thus an area of focus for us. To understand better we devised a custom survey team to better understand what they were looking for from a vision. We discovered a very diverse range of responses. When employees mentioned vision they were referring to:
- A better understanding of the strategy
- A more detailed and concrete description of a possible future e.g. what will have changed
- Better connection of their current focus to succeed in the future
- A long tail of other things!
After reviewing what our team members were looking for and where we felt there were gaps we decided a course of action. We elected to focus on improving the understanding of how different ideas connected together from organisational goals, our strategy of how we planned to outcompete, all the way through to the goals of individual teams. To ensure the logic of what we were doing as an organisation was clear and there was a line of sight from any role within the product development team on how their work connected to the big picture. We would, over the next few quarters, measure how the team felt we were doing in terms of communicating a compelling vision.
Defining and sharing a vision is difficult
At its broadest, an essential element is in communicating a vision in a way that can be understood in the same way at all levels of the organization. For us to evaluate the options for aligning around the understanding of a vision we must first breakdown a vision into its component constructs.
The definition of a vision could be seen as a collection of complementary outcomes to reach the desired future. An axiomatic element then is aligning on the understanding of a single outcome. We cover essential elements of an aligned understanding of an outcome in other posts.
If we accept that an outcome represents a desirable subpart of a ‘preferred future’, then the collection of outcomes and their relationships is a type of summation of an organization’s vision, or at least what needs to be achieved to realise the vision. In my experience, investing in building as a group a common understanding of the logic behind the different goals that form our vision helped a leadership team be more confident they were describing the same thing as they communicate to the wider organisation.
Our experience was that having invested in explaining the relationships between the organisation’s goals, the strategy and the team goals the feedback from the team was an improvement in their feeling that the organisation had a clear vision.
It's true there are other elements such as the sensory and emotional aspects of a vision that are important parts of a successful vision which help inspire and align but this experience seems to suggest these are further enhancements to build upon the logic of a what an organisation is trying to achieve.
In future posts, I will share more specifics about how we collaborated on, captured, refined and then communicated the logic behind what the organisation was seeking to do. Share the approaches your organisation has taken to ensure everyone is aligned, in the comments section. Let me know if you found any of these ideas useful.
