Setting a Direction that Inspires Everyone to Pull Towards
I think of an aligned organisation as one with its parts operating in cohesion towards a shared view of the future. What does it take to achieve this?
When I think of an aligned organisation I think of one which has all of its parts operating in cohesion towards a shared vision of the future. The opportunity that alignment offers is in maximising effort towards a future state without wasting effort towards the inessential; in effect ensuring an organisation is at its most competitive.
The enduring challenge has been that organisations struggle with painting a picture of the future that is both inspiring and, importantly, well understood by all of the employees. In this post, we will focus on how we might communicate in a way that connects the organisation to what we seek to achieve and why we believe the choices we have made will get us there.
When people, including myself, describe the absence of a compelling direction we use the phrase ‘lacking vision’. Yet trying to fill this gap with classic vision statements or presentations about the potential of your organisation’s future is rarely enough. Filling the expectations your team has for a ‘vision’ can be a challenge for a few reasons:
Diversity in what is expected from a vision 
What employees are looking for from what they might describe as a vision can differ substantially.Defining and sharing a vision is difficult 
Achieving a common understanding of a single idea is challenging; the synthesis of the sum total of an organisation’s aspirations, is even more so.
Diversity in what is expected from a vision
I’ve been on this journey more than a few times. At times it was at startups where, as the business scaled and the team grew, what was involved to keep people across the thinking and what was expected grew. Other times it was at mature businesses where circumstances such as the market and the composition of the organisation had changed. Such was the case at Seek Asia where I was CTO & CIO.
At Seek Asia, we surveyed our teams regularly using tools such as CultureAmp and OfficeVibe. ‘Vision’ was a common opportunity area for improvement and thus an area of focus for us. We failed to improve this area for a number of quarters in a row. We devised a survey for our team to better understand what they were looking for from a vision. We discovered a very diverse range of responses. When employees mentioned vision they were referring any one of the following:
A better understanding of the strategy.
A more detailed and concrete examples and rich descriptions of a possible future e.g. what will have changed for our customers and our business and what is possible.
Better connection of their current focus to succeed in the future.
Credible answers to how we would compete with formidable competition.
Confidence from leaders on the pathway forward.
A long tail of other things!
After reviewing what our team members were looking for and where we felt there were gaps we decided on a course of action. We elected to focus on improving the understanding of how different ideas connected together from organisational goals, our strategy of how we planned to outcompete, all the way through to the goals of individual teams.
This was to ensure the logic of what we were doing as an organisation was clear and there was a line of sight from any role within the product development team on how their work connected to the big picture. We would, over the next few quarters, measure how the team felt we were doing in terms of communicating a compelling vision.
Defining and sharing a vision is difficult
At its broadest, an essential element is in communicating a vision in a way that can be understood in the same way at all levels of the organization. For us to evaluate the options for aligning around the understanding of a vision we must first breakdown a vision into its component constructs.
The definition of a vision could be seen as a collection of complementary outcomes to reach the desired future. An axiomatic element then is aligning with the understanding the effects of achieving an overall outcome. We cover essential elements of an aligned understanding of outcomes in various other posts in this publication so it’s worth reading through the archive for more on this, especially those posts under the OKR section.
If we accept that an outcome represents a desirable subpart of a ‘preferred future’, then the collection of outcomes and their relationships is a type of summation of an organization’s vision, or at least what needs to be achieved to realise the vision. In my experience, investing in building as a group a common understanding of the logic behind the different goals that form our vision helped a leadership team be more confident they were describing the same thing as they communicate to the wider organisation.
Our experience was that having invested in explaining the relationships between the organisation’s goals, the strategy and the team goals the feedback from the team was an improvement in their feeling that the organisation had a clear vision. This was quite surprising, because whilst we believed this would be valuable to do, I had assumed it would have been the concrete examples of potential futures that would have been what got us there. That would have been far more aligned to the typical definition of ‘vision’.
It's true there are other elements such as the sensory and emotional aspects of a vision that are important parts of a compelling vision that can inspire and motivate but this experience seems to suggest these are further enhancements to build upon the logic of what an organisation is trying to achieve rather than what was really being sought.
In future posts, I will share more specifics about how we collaborated on, captured, refined and then communicated the logic behind what the organisation was seeking to do. Share the approaches your organisation has taken to ensure everyone is aligned, in the comments section. Let me know if you found any of these ideas useful.
