What Alice in Wonderland and Roman philosophy teach us about vision

What do Alice in Wonderland and Roman philosophy have in common? They both share at least one important lesson on the importance of a clear vision for high performing teams and organisations.

Vision statements are common, but they often exist in a going-through-the-motions, tick-the-box-of-a-strategic-planning-checklist kind of way. While most organisations have a vision statement, few have a clear, compelling and widely-understood picture of the future they aspire to create.

In his book, The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni presents six questions that are critical for organisational health. We love the six questions, which we’ve written about in another article (see the six questions that every high performing organisation must answer), because they provide a simple method for any organisation to create clarity.

But, we think there’s a missing seventh question: Where are we going?

When you answer this question with vivid clarity for your organisation or team, and work with everyone to internalise it, it will become a powerful guiding beacon that draws you toward it.

Where are we going?

There’s a moment in Alice in Wonderland when Alice approaches a fork in the road where the Cheshire cat is perched on a tree. Alice asks the cat, “Which road should I take?” to which he responds “Where are you going?”. Alice then says that she doesn’t know, to which the cat finally says, “Then any road will do”.

The lesson here for organisations is perhaps even better captured by the Roman philosopher, Seneca, who said that “When a sailor knows not which harbour he sets out for, no wind is the right wind”.

The point behind both of these stories is that, without a clear understanding of the destination, it is impossible to consistently make the right choices at each fork in the figurative road along the way, to ensure that you arrive where you want to arrive in a timely, deliberate and efficient manner. This is often the case for organisations, where their vision statement is ambiguously defined and/or insufficiently understood across the organisation for people to use it as a guiding beacon in daily decision making.

In his classic 1996 Harvard Business Review article, Building Your Company’s Vision, Jim Collins (author of Good to Great and Built to Last) and his co-author Jerry Porras identify the importance of a clearly envisioned future to any organisation’s success. The envisioned future being “what we aspire to become, to achieve, to create – something that will require significant change and progress to attain”.

Collins and Porras define an envisioned future in two components:

• Big, hairy, audacious goals (BHAGs) are ambitious plans that rev up an entire organisation and would typically take 10 to 30 years to attain
• Vivid descriptions paint a picture of what it will be like to achieve the BHAGs, by making the goals vibrant, engaging and tangible

Collins and Porras present some classic BHAGs of well-known companies:

• Boeing in 1950: Become the dominant player in commercial aircraft and bring the world into the jet age
• Nike in the 1960s: Crush Adidas
• Stanford University in the 1940s: Become the Harvard of the west

This contrasts with the classic vision statement, which is what you would typically find in most organisations. The common problem with these is that they are often unambitious or – given the constraints of a single statement – so generic that they don’t offer a clear picture of the organisation’s future.

A clearly defined and widely-shared vision acts as a guiding beacon. The clearer that everyone within an organisation can understand and picture the destination, the better they can take the steps toward it in their role within it. At each fork in the road, they will have the perspective to select the right road.

This doesn’t just apply to major strategic choices that organisations face, but also to everyday decisions where – with an eye on the guiding beacon presented by the vision – any team member can ask themselves, “Is this a clear step toward achieving our vision?”.

This is where a vivid description of the future can be impactful. By translating your long term goal (a BHAG or the vision statement) into a “vibrant, engaging and specific description of what [the future] will be like”, it provides everyone in the organisation the opportunity to internalise the image of that destination. The challenge is to transform the abstract into the concrete, to turn the intangible into the tangible, so that everyone knows where they’re going and is inspired to work together to get there.

How you can get started today

Any genuine vision for the future of your team or organisation is better than no vision. We recommend just getting started and writing something down, using a narrative form to describe your most ambitious aspirations for the team or organisation. Not in one crafted statement, but in a story that runs over a handful of pages (say three to five).

This is a creative exercise and an opportunity to envision whatever future you dream of. According to Collins and Porras, “passion, emotion and conviction are essential parts of of the vivid description”, so lean into it – doing so will not only help define the future, but it will define an inspiring future to motivate your colleagues to work together to achieve it.

Resist the procrastinator’s temptation to get something that you’re proud of first go. Have the courage to get an early draft together (however rubbish it may be) and then throw caution to the invulnerable, perfectionist wind and share it with your team to tear apart, put back together and knock into shape. Doing so will create a better, clearer vision of the future with wide understanding and ownership.

To get started, pick a date into the future (we recommend three to five years for a team, or 10 or so years for an organisation) and, without constraint, imagine what the best possible future for your team or organisation could be. Try and describe it. To help capture it in words, reflect on the following questions:

• What do you see?
• What are your team members saying? How do they feel about work? How are they behaving?
• What are your customers saying? What are they able to do, thanks to your organisation?
• What do your owners/members think and say?
• How does the community feel about your organisation? What would news articles say about the organisation?
• What does a normal day look like within the organisation?
• What breakthroughs or technological advances will have been accomplished?
• What measurable results will be achieved (across all your key performance indicators)? Quantify them.

Just make a start.

Run a workshop to develop your vision

One of the best ways to develop a vision is to collaborate with your team in a strategic planning workshop.

To help with this, we’ve developed a Strategic Planning Toolkit, which will give you everything you need to run a straightforward, practical one day workshop where you’ll develop a strategic plan in a day, including a vision.

You can download a free sample of the Strategic Planning Toolkit here.