A good vision can be intoxicating.
Management literature gives a lot of importance to creating and communicating vision – sometimes in the form of stories. It helps to motivate people and gives a general sense of direction.
I have often seen founders and operating leaders get excited about vision. They make great slides, receive cheers from employees in the town hall. Investors feel wowed.
However as months progress, the expected results don’t show up. The vision slowly becomes a wishlist. People quietly stop talking about targets. In another version of this story, a new management team comes in, decides that the previous vision was wrong, and introduces a new one.
And they start the cycle again.
I think there is a step that often gets missed between creating a vision and communicating it: validation.
Before asking people to believe in a vision, leaders need to spend time figuring out whether the organization can actually get there.
- What capabilities do we have today and what are we missing?
- Do we have the people, technology, money and time required?
- What all could go wrong?
- Which assumptions are we making?
- What needs to happen first?
- And very importantly: Can we break this big vision down into a few concrete things that need to happen over the next 6, 12 and 24 months?
Vision becomes real only when you can see the results and not when we talk about it loudly and boldly.
The uncomfortable part is that validation takes a hell lot of time, even months. That delay and uncertainty takes away the excitement for some leaders.
However validation, forces leaders to confront constraints, risks and things they don’t know yet.
A few things we should remind ourselves –
* A compelling story is a starting point, not a strategy.
* A vision needs to survive contact with reality.
* The bigger the vision, the more important it is to break it down into smaller bets and milestones.
* If you cannot explain what the outcomes are in the next 6–12 months, you probably haven’t gone deep enough into the vision yet.
* Validation may make a vision less exciting initially, but much more believable.
Have you seen a great vision fail because the organization never really validated what it would take to make it happen?
