A Definition

There are lots of definitions. At the risk of raising objections, we define Mission, Vision and Value statements as follows;

A Mission Statement defines the organization’s purpose and primary objectives. Its prime function is internal – to define the key measure or measures of the organization’s success – and its prime audience is the leadership team and stockholders.

Vision Statements define the organizations future fully developed state and its purpose. For employees, it gives a longer term view of where the organization is headed and inspires them to give their best. Shared with customers, it shapes customers’ understanding of why they should work with the organization.

A Statement of Values describes how you behave and your ethical and moral standings. A statement of Values can inform your organization’s natural reaction to periods of stress or conflict. Some organizations also have statements of Values with an internal or external focus, or both. Many organizations do not create this third statement – it is optional.

You likely will have one overarching Mission Statement, but you might have another under wraps that reflects a, currently confidential, change in business focus.

You may have multiple Visions, some for internal consumption only, and some for external stakeholders. You may have near, medium and long term visions and may be unwilling, for a range of strategic and competitive reasons, to let them all out into the light. Don’t be bound by the notion that there is only one Vision Statement.

You should have only one statement of Values if you elect to develop this item.

Keep Them Current

While you don’t want to be changing your fundamentals every year, you need to be nimble and adaptable – to have “nimbility”. You must test your statements regularly to confirm their validity. Hypocrisy is the death of these statements and your employees are likely sufficiently cynical that they will smell a rat if you produce one. Having flowery statements and not living up to them is worse than not having them at all.

They may end up on a plaque somewhere, but that doesn’t make them inviolate.

Note that we suggest that you might have multiple mission and vision statements. Change is inevitable and should be driven, predicted and planned to the greatest possible extent. You should be asking yourself, how will change impact my fundamentals? How will my mission evolve? What is my longer term vision or what are my potential alternate visions, and how do I plan for them and ensure that I am in control of the direction my organization takes?

Don’t Get Bogged Down

It can be difficult to develop these statements and committees generally make a mess of them.

Take a stab at developing the words, but don’t overcook the process. As soon as it gets boring or frustrating, put them aside and get back to work on your core strategic plan. Work your plan, referring back to your draft mission and vision statements and allow the statements to evolve as the strategy crystallizes and as pared down to its actionable core. At the end, re-write the mission and vision statements as necessary.

A note on committees: We tend to strike committees when we want to protect individuals from the consequences of making decisions, and the result is that committees tend to produce uninspiring, bland and over-engineered outputs. I have rarely seen a brave committee. By all means reach out for ideas and input and use facilitators to really understand what is important to your entire team – then lead by writing the final statements yourself.

How to Create Mission and Vision Statements

Before you do anything, answer the Six Simple Strategy Questions. If you can’t answer these, you have some work to do on fundamentals before you can fully develop Mission and Vision statements. This will likely end up bring a circular process, with strategic focus and intent driving the statements, and the work on statement development feeding back into refined strategic intent.

Mission Statement Creation

1. To create your mission statement, first identify your organization’s “winning idea”.
2. This is the idea or approach that will make your organization stand out from its competitors, and is the reason that customers will come to you and not your competitors.
3. Next identify the key measures of your success. Make sure you choose the most important measures (and not too many of them!)
4. Combine your winning idea and success measures into a tangible and measurable goal.
5. Refine the words until you have a concise and precise statement of your mission, which expresses your ideas, measures and desired result.

Vision Statement Creation

1. First identify your organization’s mission.
2. Next, describe what your organization will look like at some point in the future. This can be when it has fully matured and or at some interim state or states (you can have more than one vision time horizon). This can be represented by any of; business performance, product scope and capabilities, customer relations, market penetration and leadership, etc.
3. Next, identify what you, your customers and other stakeholders will value most about how your organization will achieve this mission and future state. Distil these into the values that your organization has or should have.
4. Combine your mission, future vision and values, and polish the words until you have a vision statement inspiring enough to energize and motivate people inside and outside your organization.
5. If you have developed multiple vision statements, be clear about which one is the current public truth and how you are going to evolve the business toward later stages of development. Identify the change management techniques and tools that you will use to ease this transition.

Refer to our comments above about keeping these statements current and not getting bogged down in their development.