Please do not adjust your set.

A 1970s television set is probably not the first thing to spring to mind when you think about business planning – but it is an image that often comes into mine when I talk with my executive coaching clients about creating a Vision for their business (or, indeed, for their personal life).

A vision is a vivid mental image of what you want your business or your life to be in the future: a vision statement is ideally a brief and succinct description of this which can inspire a shared purpose in those involved and keep you on track. It’s a way of defining what success would look and feel and taste like – a kind of brochure for your chosen destination. Without a vision any kind of strategic planning is very difficult – how do you know which journey to set out on if you don’t know what your destination is?

Creating a vision can be a straightforward process:

Start by choosing your time frame – 5-10 years is popular but there is nothing to stop you defining alternative parameters.

Then think about what really matters to you, the starting point for your vision is internal – not what your competition is doing or what you think might work in the market place. It is about your core values, what you are passionate about, what makes you want to get out of bed in the morning – it might be to do with saving the planet or helping your local community but it will be what is meaningful to you. Don’t narrow down your options too fast – think widely about your possibilities.

Once you have a feeling for what success will feel like to you, take a virtual seat in that landscape – 5 or 10 years into the future - and have a good look around you. Does it feel like you expected it to? Which parts of your life have grown with you and which parts have you lost along the way? Is it realistic? Does it still excite you?

If it feels right think about what your vision offers to others – what problem have you solved or new options have you offered the world? Why will people want to engage with you and your business? If you can’t answer this then your vision may be beautiful but you won’t have any customers.

Now write your vision statement in clear language (no jargon!) – describing the key concept as succinctly as possible so that you can share it with your stakeholders. Here are a couple of examples:

'There will be a personal computer on every desk running Microsoft software.' (Microsoft's original vision statement)

'Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.' (Amazon.com)

A shared vision means that you can move towards the future that you want, that actions and decisions and progress can be evaluated against that vision. It saves wasting time, money and energy.

The problems with a vision start when it begins to get too detailed, and that’s where my 1970s TV set comes in. In the 70s the picture clarity was not what you might call sharp, in fact if you were getting the same kind of reception now you would be calling up an engineer or saving your pennies for a new set; features were softer, objects were fuzzier, the background was more Monet than 3D – but the story was just as clear. And that is how a Vision should be.

A vision should talk about the result not the route, save the full details for your strategic planning. If your vision begins to define how you will achieve success you risk encountering a couple of pitfalls:

Deflection: a vision is based on your core values and will be subject to change much less than the world around it, whereas your strategy and day to day activities will naturally change regularly as the world changes. Who knows what technological, social and political changes the next 5-10 years will bring? If your picture is very clear then there is a chance that you will overlook opportunities and skew decisions to bring to fruition the picture, not the core vision. What might have happened if Amazon had stipulated ‘books’ alone in their statement?

Disappointment: if you have painted a detailed picture in your head of exactly what your vision looks like – down to the details of how your ultimate software version will run or your precisely targeted client – then you are setting yourself up for potential disappointment: a mismatch between expectations and reality. We have all spent months before our holiday imagining enjoying the fabulous weather, swimming in the peaceful pool, lying on a glorious beach, only to turn up and find the sky overcast, the pool full of excited children and the beach full of bitey bugs. Accepting that our core requirements of the holiday are rest, relaxation, time together and away from email is a defence against disappointment in the finer detail of the experience. The same holds true of your business vision, keep it high level - the way you get there might change but it doesn’t mean that the result isn’t just as good.

Let’s hope that Microsoft changed their vision along the way to take out the bit about the desk and embrace mobile technology. Sometimes it’s worth keeping the picture a little fuzzy.