Five Common Pitfalls In Organizational Vision-Setting And How To Avoid Them

This article was originally published for the Forbes Nonprofit Council.

Vision-setting as an organizational practice sometimes gets a bad rap, perhaps because too often, it’s done badly. As an advocate for long-term strategic visioning, I would argue that those who dismiss the value of vision-setting miss out on an opportunity to foster alignment, catalyze innovation, increase efficiency and, ultimately, boost organizational impact.

Can a few words on a PowerPoint slide do all that? No. But a robust, disciplined vision-setting practice is more than simply words. It’s an entire strategic and operational philosophy, refined through the lens of a dedicated workstream with specific, clearly defined outputs.

While every organization’s visioning process will be a bit different, certain errors in approach are common, regardless of size or sector. Below, I’ll outline five common pitfalls to avoid. I’ll also provide advice and examples of how my organization, TCS Education System, uses visioning to elevate every aspect of our work.

Pitfall #1: Failure To Set A Time Frame

Those enamored with the aspirational aspects of vision-setting may be surprised to see something as dull as deadlines at the top of this list. But in my view, establishing a time constraint is critical. While organizational vision is indeed a feat of imagination, it is also, at its root, a collection of goals. And how can one determine the best path to completion without understanding timing?

At TCS, we refresh our organizational vision on a five-year cycle. We’ve chosen this cadence intentionally to allow enough time to achieve high-impact system-wide change. A shorter time frame might inhibit expansive thinking; anything longer might be so open-ended as to reduce a sense of urgency. The optimum duration for a visioning cycle will vary for different organizations, but the principle remains the same: Only by tethering vision to a specific time frame can we hold ourselves accountable and, ultimately, evaluate success.

Pitfall #2: Expecting Too Much From A Brief, Inspiring Statement

We’ve come to understand all too well the hazards of building a vision around a pithy statement that gets posted in the lobby, then ignored until it literally fades into the wallpaper. While many factors contribute to this common visioning failure, oversimplification is a big one. A truly meaningful visioning process requires documented output that is far richer and more complex than a summary message.

For example, our formal vision statement encompasses several pages of specific ambitions, organized by themes and tied to functional areas. By driving your visionary thinking deeper into the realm of operational realities, you may be more likely to achieve the vision’s intended purpose: inspiring concrete action.

Pitfall #3: Declaring Truth From The Top

Isn’t establishing an organizational vision the charter of a leadership team? Yes and no. Certainly those in leadership roles have a basis to form sound opinions about the future. But senior leaders may also lack visibility to the fine points of day-to-day operations—and these gaps can prove crippling when it’s time to translate vision to action. Furthermore, it’s natural for teams to be most receptive to strategies they played a role in crafting.

Look for ways to bring in the perspectives of people throughout your organization. We navigate this balance by investing significant time and energy to make vision-setting a true community effort. From initiation to completion, our visioning exercise involves a dozen or more stakeholder sessions. As president, I personally visit every physical location in our system, together with members of my leadership team, as part of this collaborative process.

Pitfall #4: Overreliance On The Wisdom Of The Crowd

On the opposite end of the spectrum, some organizations make the mistake of pursuing an entirely “flat,” purely democratic approach to vision-setting. While there is a time for broad input—and many important insights can be revealed through such engagement—open-forum sharing alone cannot yield a meaningful strategic vision. There is simply too much natural diversity of opinions and priorities among individual team members to expect a rational strategy to rise to the surface organically.

At TCS, our vision-setting cycle follows a structured path that begins with an initial session with our board of trustees. Progressively broader groups of leaders and stakeholders from throughout the system community are then invited to offer input through an iterative, collaborative development and refinement process. Consider how your organization could follow a similar process.

Pitfall #5: Confusing Vision With Plans

I’ve heard people laugh at the notion of a five-year visioning workshop that lasts just one day. And the idea of locking down five years’ worth of comprehensive plans in just a few hours is indeed absurd. It’s important to remember that a vision is just that: a snapshot of where an organization aspires to be in five years’ time. An effective vision paints a picture of the future, but it does not articulate the path to get there. That is the work of an “actions plan”—and I purposefully call it an actions plan, plural, because these actions are many, varied and must be meticulously mapped.

Your vision should exist in partnership with an actions plan, in which every team and function has a stake. This plan should translate vision-based goals into clearly defined, time-bound initiatives with both annual and longer-term objectives, tied to specific KPIs. Know that developing actions plans takes far longer than vision-setting alone.

The saying is trite but true: If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there. In my experience, a deep-rooted practice of long-term visioning combined with actions planning has been key to success. We’ve proven the value of our approach by advancing audacious goals. Interestingly, we’ve also seen visioning pay off in areas where factors outside our control have knocked the best-laid plans awry, like when Covid-19 forced a reinvention of cross-cultural community engagement.

A robust foundational vision provides both the power to drive forward toward opportunity and the flexibility to pivot, with intention, in the face of challenge. The result: an enduring cycle of positive impact for your organization and the communities you serve.