Reality Based Management

The Vision Thing

I often hear the complaint that “We don’t have a shared vision.” In 22 years of management, I have gone from ignorance of visions, to embracing visions, to becoming an anti-visionist. ”The Vision” is a myth, created to explain the intangible difference between managers/organizations that are effective, and others aren’t. A few years ago I endured a multi-hour meeting with a group of managers trying to create the vision for a new organization. I kept a low profile, not wanting to poison the discussion with my “anti-vision” feelings. It struck me that amongst these 8 managers, a reasonably well functioning team, no two managers agreed on more than one or two of the essential attributes of a vision. They disagreed on whether it should be “customer viewable”, the time frame represented, ideal number of words, how often it should updated, inclusion of financial goals, was it specific enough to help us make decisions, how inspiring it should be, should it be developed collaboratively or generated by the leader, and so on. I don’t believe I sabotaged the meeting, I think there were just fundamental disagreement on what a vision was.
Could it be that we can’t agree on hardly anything that has to do with “The Vision” because it has more to do with our personalities than the true needs of the organization? Does an organizational vision ever exist, or are we just trying to verbalize what motivates us as individuals? If this is true, the attributes of the visions we propose say more about us than it does about the organization. Is it reasonable to insist that a diverse group of people must share the same vision in order to be successful?
Some people attempt to use “proof by example” that Visions can exist. Two ubiquitous examples are John F. Kennedy’s “put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade” and Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. These were incredibly inspiring speeches, but were they Visions? Or did they just tap into the country’s underlying energy and direction of the time? JFK wanted a goal that would spark the nation into action. He made it specific, measurable, and achievable—it worked. MLK explicitly tapped into the bedrock of the American dream that values your character and what you accomplish over who you happened to be born to. This worked too, although his dream is still not fully realized.

The fact remains, that some organizations are generally agreed to be healthier than others. What can managers do to create a healthier environment?