Does your organization suffer from a vision deficit?
All companies claim to have a vision, but it is often too generic to be up to its tasks. Here’s how to identify if this is the case for yours.
There’s a joke I heard a while back. It went:
Question: How many people work in this office?
Answer: Work? About two thirds of them.
There are countless iterations, often citing specific companies. This speaks to a universal experience: who hasn’t worked at — or otherwise interacted with— a company whose output felt abysmal compared to its resources?
But it’s worth asking what happens in those companies. Assuming they are massively unproductive, does it mean that a fraction of their employees do nothing all day? Maybe play hacky sack on the roof? I don’t think many people would find this a compelling hypothesis.
The answer is much more straightforward: everybody works, just not on the same goal.
Go into any such company and look at any individual contributor or team; you will see lots of activity and progress. But take a step back, and you will see a flock of headless chickens¹: lots of motion with little to no overall progress to show for it.
When teams work in opposite directions, their resultant product is null. When they work in orthogonal ones, there is still an output, but lower than what the resources could have left us to hope for.
What’s the solution? You need to align everyone’s efforts to go in the same direction. The solution for that is to have a good vision. The company’s vision is the north star towards which the company should be going. A clear vision is critical to align employees’ efforts and ensure maximum productivity — and happiness! Yet many (if not most) companies have a severe lack of vision.
Here are some signs that yours might be one of them.
Framework-itis
Has your company implemented Scrum, ICE, OKRs, Shape Up², or any new framework only to find that you are still unclear on what you should focus on or where you’re headed?
Frameworks are often presented as tools to help get alignment and clarity, but they are tactical, day-to-day help. And, as Yogi Berra said:
You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.
If you know what you want to accomplish and have identified specific issues that a framework was built to resolve, implementing one may help. But a framework will not give you a direction. Employees of visionless companies following frameworks will be no more productive: they will still be headless chickens, except that now, instead of just running at random, they will sometimes stop for a stand-up or to update their progress in an AirTable sheet.
New-project-itis
That’s when a company constantly drops everything only to focus on the new most important thing — which might get dropped in a second when something even more importanter comes up. Who has never been through that?
My older sister taught me one of my most important management lessons when I was 18, and she was teaching me how to drive. I was constantly correcting the car's path, trying to keep it in the exact middle of the lane, when my sister told me to stop doing that, look at the horizon, and drive toward where I wanted to go. Massive change for me and my passengers!
The same applies to a company. If you have no idea of where you’re going in the long term, you’re bound to constantly course-correct and jump from one next big thing to another, with dramatic consequences for your productivity.
Not knowing who you work for (or against)
OK, I’ll drop the fake disease names now. Ask around your company: who are your customers? Who are your competitors?
In many cases, the answers you’ll get are
- Blank stares
- Generic responses à la “whoever buys our product” (for customers), “whoever does what we do” (for competitors)
Both are signs that you have no clear idea of where you’re going. I’ve talked at greater length about the competitors aspects of this question in the past, but in short, your competitors aren’t those companies doing what you are doing. They are whatever your customers would be using if you didn’t exist — which may look nothing like what you’re doing!
Having no clear answer to the customers side of the question means that you have acquired an audience organically (kudos!) but without a clear picture of where you’re going. This has some serious risks, the most severe being trying to keep everyone in your customer base happy, which risks diluting the value of your product as you try to keep too many balls in the air.
Plain old lack of vision³
Ask ten people in your company: What should our next big bet be? What will we look like in five years? What are we going to do that our most significant competitor will not?
In a vision-challenged company, you will get ten wildly different answers.
Think about what this means, day to day: these ten different people will, in good faith, try to further what they think the company should be doing, potentially undermining one another’s work or just doing things that are opposite to the company’s goals. You’ll be back to the initial joke, with the impression that only a small fraction of the company’s staff are actually working.
What should I do about it?
Well, work on your vision! It cannot be generic and broad, like “increase our sales” or “become the best in our field.” It has to conjure a precise and shared image of your company in the future, behind which all of your employees will be able to stand.
A good place to start would be reading my previous article about what makes a good vision… well good.
¹ For the scientists among you, an analogy I like is also Brownian motion: every particle is constantly moving, but the fluid as a whole shows no flow
² I have nothing against those frameworks, to be clear, and use some daily! But they will not save you from a lack of vision…
³ I hear you thinking: “Lack of vision is a sign of vision deficiency? You don’t say!” but bear with me.
About me
I’m a product manager, 500 Startups alumnus, and consultant.
I’m head of product at a growth company and consult on product management in large companies and start-ups alike.
The rest of the time, I read random books and cook vast amounts of food.
Connect with me through my website, Medium, and LinkedIn.
