A reflective piece on why vision, values, mission and strategy can be confusing

I recall when I was 18 years old, and sitting through a meeting and the leader of the group says ok so I'll be presenting our vision for the year... "Community" - we're going to aim for community and we're going to add this program and that program etc. I left the meeting a little confused, so wait the purpose of our organisation is community? Isn't that an outcome that occurs when people gather around a vision? It didn't feel like a vision it felt like a good thing to aim for, it felt like goals...

I've been pondering this a lot as our company has doubled in size in the last year, and below is an excerpt form an internal email from my personal journal that I sent to our leadership this morning (slightly edited).

The post is structured in such a way as to facilitate questions and discussion NOT to necessarily give answers.

THE MIX and THE CONFUSION:

Since then I’ve spent much time reflecting on this as we've grown our own organisation. Rallying a few hundred people nationally around a collective "vision" can be challenging. In hindsight I have a lot more empathy for the leader of the aforementioned group, on the surface it made sense, but it felt "off". I've observed in myself that there is often confusion between, vision, values, mission, strategy. It's confusing because we live all four simultaneously. Depending on what is going on in our lives or our organisations we have waves emphasising and focusing one some over the other. We are mixing these ideas together in our businesses. When we say vision, what do we mean? So, our team often get confused, we often synonymise vision with goals etc.

The challenge is they are all happening in parallel, but they are not the same. Confusion occurs when we overlap the definitions. So, I thought I’d document some thoughts from my morning reflections below:

"The challenge is they are all happening in parallel, but they are not the same."

Values: Who are we? This is the most foundational, and fundamental pillar. Life Ready has always been unwavering on who we are, I have always been unwavering on who I am, and I think this has largely been our strength as a company built on family and friendship. We are united because we share a common morality, we have communal terms as to what we believe defines right and wrong, justice and injustice in our culture. We are aligned because to breach any of these social covenants even whilst achieving goals would be failure. QUESTION: to what extent does your team or your values align with your organisation? Do you have additional values that you conflate onto your team or your peers/ partners? Does anyone in your team have conflicting values that they conflate onto you and their peers (this is the foundation of toxicity in the workplace)?

"We are aligned because to breach any of these social covenants even whilst achieving goals would be failure"

Mission: This is what that drives all of our strategy and crafts our vision. Raise the bar of our profession, this has always meant that Life Ready is a movement that intends to position itself as a key influencer in writing the narrative for physio in Australia. QUESTION: Where do you see yourself fitting into your organisation's mission? How can each person you are privileged to lead contribute to the mission most effectively to the mission? 

Vision: A tangible picture of the future imagining now what the future would look like if we achieve our mission whilst keeping our values. What does this mean? It means the vision changes, as we learn more, as the world changes, how our values manifest to the world and how our mission looks applied will shift the quicker the world changes. For example, 5 years ago, AI wouldn't even have factored into a future we could imagine, but now very much it must layer into and inform a picture of the future we as leaders imagine and conceptualise. Our company's vision is reimagined every year at our annual partners and board retreats. QUESTION: Where do you see yourself in the future given your organisations mission and values? Where do each of the people you are charged with leading belong? Who will move on? How can you make proactive steps to ensure progress for those with potential?

Strategy: Based on the facts we have today, based on KPI's data and information that we can assess, what are the most important goals we need to achieve? What methods do we need to apply to pursue our vision, whilst staying true to our mission and values? Strategy must change, in fact, if it doesn't change regularly then you'll quickly be disrupted. In Life Ready this can be jarring for our people. Because we are driving on a road un driven, which means we are adaptable, we are learning as we move, so our journey feels disorienting. We are going in our true north (Mission), in the best car possible (Values), to a destination we know will be beautiful but has never been seen (Vision) but the road is bumpy (strategy) because it is untrodden.

Strategy is dynamic because facts change every day, and our job as leaders must be to read everything, live constantly curious, and make wise informed decisions on a daily basis that ensure our strategy doesn't compromise our values, whist moving us toward our mission.

QUESTION: Are you too busy to be curious? Are you making decisions based on strategies in the past that have become traditions?  

"Strategy is dynamic because facts change every day, and our job as leaders must be to read everything, live constantly curious"

Final Observations

You'll notice each one is on a spectrum of unchanging to changing regularly and each one informs the other like foundations to a building for example

Values (unchanging set by the founding partners) --> Mission (Somewhat unchanging - set by the founding members of the company) --> Vision (Changing annually at our annual board retreat) --> Strategy (Changing regularly, monthly at our board/ executive meetings).

For those who lead: This reflection was a timely reminder for me, to pause, reflect, meditate and journal the things that are most important and yet not urgent. As we grow faster, culture dilution and mission drift become real challenges that left unchecked become toxic, and fighting for time to observe my feelings, my biases, and my concerns can and should take up a substantive portion of a leaders time.

For those who are members of a team: These questions matter for you, because there is nothing more rewarding for a leader than a follower who has accurate clarity around who they are, and what they want. If you aren't clear on your beliefs and values, and you might subconsciously be imposing unrealistic values onto your team. If you aren't clear on who you are and what you want then like a tree with short roots you'll blow wherever the wind takes you (Christian proverb) - Fight for clarity, and curiously discover clarity around the above 4 things in the organisation or team you are part of and then see if it aligns with your own.

You can't necessarily create values and mission, only define it, you already have values, and so does your team or organisation, perhaps just no one has given it clear articulation yet.