Four Rules for Writing Winning Vision Statements

1. Take any successful business you know, including yours, and place it in Baghdad. How's it going to do? What would make your community a better place to live?
A winning vision statement addresses the environment of the organization -- the communities it serves -- and what should be better so the organization can excel.

2. When the world that your employees, volunteers, and customers live in is a better place, they will all positively impact your business. A vision is not projection of trends, nor a projection of your growth, for example. A vision does not include platitudes about the good things that already exist; yes we want to perpetuate them, but conditions that require improvement to achieve will inspire the organization more.
A winning vision statement is a set of ideals & desired conditions of how we want to see things improved.

3. Putting numbers in a vision only makes it too concrete, too practical to be motivational. Nobody really cares if you reach milestones of growth; people care more about making a true difference for others.
A winning vision statement contains no numbers although, it may use a percentage to relate a degree to which a major issue (hunger, racial tension) is resolved.

4. Since most organizations' so called "strategic planning" have so long been bogged down at the level of long-range business planning, it may be practical to take their vision horizon up in stages from 5 to 10 to 20 to 30 years.
A winning vision statement paints a picture of life more than 30 years hence. The words used to describe it make it possible for everybody to see it in their minds, and desire it.

With a lofty vision (ends policy) to look toward, management has the direction it needs to develop business plans (means policies) to make that journey. It will become clearer what other organizations and businesses to align with, partner with, and contribute to.

Whether Board Meetings Soar or Deflate Rides on Meeting Packet

For several decades, credit union and other non-profit executives have prepared agenda packets for their directors. This helps them prepare for board actions — a good thing. In probably 80 percent of all of them, prepared information passes one time a month from the office to the directors.

In an era focusing on governance, boards have been shifting away from acting on operational issues at their meetings to discussing the long-range future, strategic issues, the mission, etc. This, too, is a good thing.

Unfortunately, having all the data that represents operations delivered in the package known as the board’s meeting materials minimizes—even derails—this important shift from operational focus to strategic discussion. All the information arrives in the same package (whether printed or available in electronic form) because it started out that all the information pertained to the board’s action agenda. Now, it all does not.

It is a given that directors need to have information to monitor the organization's performance. And it’s also true that directors need to have advance information and ideas to stimulate their discussions about the future. But it might be better to deliver the two types of information separately—not as one massive board packet.

Much of my work has to do with focus and mind-set. That is especially true when I facilitate strategic planning retreats. I have determined through experience and experimentation that on a given day, it’s best to start with the longest-term, most general planning ideas and gradually work down to details.

It’s a little like flying a hot air balloon. Since people are mired in daily business and personal issues, it takes a good deal of time to get the minds warmed up to thinking lofty, long-term and in the clouds. Getting people to make the mental shift from managing to visioning is a progressive, often gradual, process to orchestrate. Once up there, it only takes the smallest mention of a short-term concern is like opening the canopy of the hotair balloon and letting all the hot air out.

A board meeting can suffer the same fate. The meeting is a change of venue, a break in one’s day. The board meeting is new context, allowing individuals to rise above the small and short-term, to deal with the large and long-term -- to get on a strategic level, if led there. However, if you start the board meeting on an operational footing, in is unlikely you’ll never reach the strategic level at that meeting.

To effect that high level for the participants of a board meeting, make the meeting materials all about the future. That means delivering all the operational reports in a separate package.
This also means you can hold your board meetings earlier in a month. Since the meeting no longer focuses on operational issues, it does not have to wait to receive operational reports in order to meet. You might even get into a preferred restaurant for the meeting because you are no longer competing for space with other boards later in the month.

Discussions of the long-range future do not rely on any month’s or any quarter’s results. Instead, as directors and executives discuss the long-range future, they do so with a memory of the operational trends displayed in the charts and graphs included periodically in the separate operational reports package.

This idea means change, and change can be a hassle. Nevertheless, if you are serious about having hot, future-oriented board discussions that soar in the clouds of long-term thought, then this is an idea that deserves some serious groundwork to launch it.

What do you think?

True Strategic Planning is Macro, Not Micro

A community-centered vision gives the business plan something more meaningful to work for than to only benefit the credit union itself. Leading organizations advocate for their communities.

Strategic is a popular word often used to label business planning. Credit union’s do business planning for market share, technology, and growth, for examples. Business planning is necessary and is a micro perspective — what affects an individual credit union.

Micro planning without macro planning is contributing to the fracturing of the credit union movement. While organizational success is the duty of its officers, whose duty is it to preserve a place in society and the economy for credit unions, if not those same officers?

True strategic planning is looking for what’s over the horizon, between the lines, and in the shadows — looking for what is not obvious. Strategic planning is the macro perspective — seeking to preserve the viability of the communities it serves, and the movement. A credit union draws resources and life from its communities; improving its communities is an “enlightened self-interest.”

Boards Bury Visioning in Concrete

We have attracted good people to be on credit union and nonprofit Boards. They are almost all left-brain dominant who like to do concrete things like solving problems; they prefer not to have free-flowing discussion about intangible things, such as vision statements.

Therefore, in large measure, our leadership boards remain involved in management-level planning and decision-making. First, let’s understand about our two brains. Actually, two parts of our brains. We have a right-hemisphere that is simultaneous, and a left-hemisphere that is sequential. Daniel Pink suggests we see it this way, “the right is the picture, and the left is the thousand words.” We all use both hemispheres all the time, yet one side dominates how we think and act.

Here are observations and facts to consider:

• The majority of humans are left-brain dominant. That’s been good for much of human history, helping humans adapt to life on earth through the rigors of science, the industrial revolution, and pyramidal organizational structures.
  Boards of nonprofits are more left-brained than the average population. Maybe it’s because in the early days, Boards did all the work, getting satisfaction from completing taks.
• Left-brain dominant directors (and managers) prefer to work with familiar problems and solve them. Board agendas bring such decisions to the board. Those decisions keep out the strategic and visionary discussions that may keep their organizations relevant: Relevance = survival.
• Boards are accustomed to examining monthly, questioning recent activities, and making management-like decisions because many of them are managers in their vocations. Making decisions on concrete issues is intrinsically satisfying to left-brained dominant folks.
• Discussing issues with no immediate and concrete answers frustrate left-brain dominant people, and people naturally avoid frustration.
  Strategic thinking is more a right-brain activity. Since right-brain activities are random, unplanned, scattered, artistic, creative, and often off-the-wall, they don’t quite fit the traditional Board agenda.

You get the idea. Read Daniel H. Pink’s, 2005 book, A Whole New Mind. He makes the case that we’re passing into an era in human history that favors right-brained skills. [ buy the book here ]

Restructure Board activities and agenda to focus on strategic and big-picture issues. Recruit directors and more managers with right-brain tendencies and skills.

Get creative or perish. If you don’t believe perishing is a real possibility, you’re not seeing the long-term picture, and I can’t fit in the thousand words here.