Vision, Role, Mission, Goal: a framework for business motivation

Editor's Notes

• #2: Tetradian Consulting Unit 215 9 St Johns Street Colchester CO2 7NN England [+44] (0) 781 560 6624 [email_address] www.tetradian.com
• #3: The purpose of this slidepack is to introduce the Vision / Role / Mission / Goal framework for business motivation. (Or ‘VRMG framework’, for simplicity.) It’s aimed at people whose work revolves around balancing ‘big picture’ issues with day-to-day practice – roles such as enterprise-architects, strategists and planners – but it should also be useful for most business managers. What it tackles is the contentious issue of ‘visioning’ in business – contentious because it’s so rarely done well!
• #4: ‘ Vision’ is one of those issues that may seem abstract at first, but addresses a real, concrete, practical concern: why do we do what we do? How does doing this help the organisation to achieve its purpose? – if there is a purpose, of course... There are two key reasons why this is important: we might perhaps be very efficient, but we can’t be effective unless we have some idea of whether or not we’re ‘on purpose’; and having some sense of purpose is the key to business motivation – in other words, it’s what gets people out of bed in the morning, wanting to do their work. This isn’t trivial. If we can’t provide a clear sense of business-purpose, people can only bring to their work whatever motivation of their own they may have – which may not help the organisation at all...
• #5: So there’s a real need for a kind of ‘audit-trail’ of business purpose, providing a clear reason and validation for every activity within the organisation. And the four layers of vision , role , mission and goal provide perhaps the simplest framework for that type of audit-trail.
• #6: See how this works in a slightly different context, for an ISO-9000 type quality-system. This too requires a full audit-trail up and down a hierarchy of levels - in this case a trail of responsibility rather than motivation, but the principle is the same. Work-instructions define the details of what to do on a day-to-day basis. But whenever something changes, we need to change the Work-instruction. To do this, we go upward to the Procedure, which describes the overall process and responsibilities, but not the operational detail. If the Procedure won’t cover the change, we go upward again to the Policy level, to help us define a new Procedure as a basis for the new Work-instruction. And if the organisation’s ‘world’ has changed so much that the Policy won’t cover it, ISO-9000:2000 tells us to go upward one further step, to the Vision layer – the ultimate, unchanging anchor for the quality-system.
• #7: We’ll see much the same with business motivation. Each Goal should implement and support a Mission, and is also guided by that Mission. Each Mission supports and implements a Role, which in turn provides the reason for that Mission. And each Role – an organisation may have several Roles at once, such as manufacture, logistics and retail – implements and is guided by the Vision. So as for the quality-system, the Vision is the ultimate anchor for business motivation.
• #8: Work-instructions and Goals are similar: they both deal with the short-term, the immediate, the ever-changing day-to-day. But through their respective audit-trails, they each have anchors all the way up into the organisation’s Vision. The point here is that it’s the same Vision on both sides: there’s only one Vision. And it never changes – which is what makes it the organisation’s anchor.
• #9: The key point in this quote from management-consultants Sogeti/CapGemini is that the organisation does not exist in isolation: it’s merely one part, one player, within a much larger ‘eco-system’. This hierarchy of Vision, Role, Mission, Goal, and on down to everyday activities, helps to clarify what value the organisation adds, and how, to that overall eco-system.
• #10: Another way to look at this is in terms of ends or means: what we want to achieve, and the way we want to get there. This kind of framework is used, for example, in the Business Rules Group’s draft ISO-standard Business Motivation Model . (The main difference here is that that model doesn’t recognise Role.) The high-level Role and other organisational roles are the bridges between Ends and Means. All those roles in the ‘org-chart’ link activities to Goals; whilst the activities of specialist roles such as planners and the Programme Management Office merge all those Goals in support of the respective Missions. It works; that’s how it works. What this model doesn’t tell us, though, is what any of these things are. ISO-9000, for example, tells us we must have a Vision, but doesn’t tell us what one would look like. So that’s what we need to turn to next.
• #11: Let’s start from the top, even though Vision is at the kind of abstract layer with which many people are uncomfortable. Where most attempts at defining a Vision go wrong – and we’ll look at this again later – is that they look only at the organisation itself: the classic marketing-style ‘vision’ of “to be the best this-that-or-the-other”. But to work properly as an anchor for everything the organisation does, the Vision needs to be much broader, and much larger than the organisation itself. It needs to describe a ‘desired world’, with space for all the other players we need to make the enterprise work – our customers, suppliers, partners, even our competitors, and so on. And it’s not something we can measure, or ‘achieve’: it just is .
• #12: So as we saw from the examples, the Vision is a short, simple statement that describes that ‘desired world’. It’s about who ‘we’ is , as an organisation; it’s about what we aspire to; the kind of thing that’ll “get us out of bed in the morning”. (Interesting point: if it doesn’t appeal to us in this literally emotive way, we’re possibly in the wrong organisation...) Although it may at first seem abstract, it’s also immediately practical: a Vision of “a more sociable world”, as in the Lion Nathan example, tells us a great deal straight away about what kind of hiring-policies we’d need, what kind of customers we’d have, some of the regulatory problems we might face, and so on. In other words, a really useful ‘anchor’. And the Vision’s implied boundaries around our organisation’s interest also help us to identify those subtle but all-important ‘weak signals’ of future changes in technology, in society, or whatever, that are so important to strategy.
• #13: The Role describes where the organisation fits, as one actor amongst many contributing to the world of the Vision. There’s no qualifier to the Role - no “best of”, or “premier provider of”, or suchlike – just a simple statement about what the organisation does in this Role. By placing this boundary around what it does, the Role automatically implies other Roles that would be needed to make the Vision-world happen. For example, if we see our Role as a ‘brewer and distributor’, for a Vision of ‘a more sociable world’, we’ll need to connect with a wide variety of other Roles – not only the obvious ones such as ‘customer’ and ‘supplier’, but others such as ‘a provider of police services’. Our Vision and Role tell us that these odder intersections with other Roles would be an expected part of business – which reduces possibilities for unpleasant surprises. Unlike the Vision, the Role does drift or change shape slowly, over time. We may find that a different set of boundaries to our Role may be a better fit with our capabilities – our Missions; we may choose to change it when a new technology makes possible a new Mission; and so on. But we don’t really ‘achieve’ a Role: it’s simply what we do – what we choose to do.
• #14: So that’s a Role. It puts manageable boundaries – our processes, overall activities, geographical constraints – around the part (or parts) we choose to play within ‘the everything’ of the Vision-world. It gives us some strong indications of other necessary partners and players – other Roles – in our chosen Vision-world, and our likely relationship with each. And it clarifies both opportunity-management and risk-management – helping us to be prepared for surprise, rather than futilely struggling against it.
• #15: Like ‘vision’, ‘mission’ is a word that’s been much misused and mangled in many business-motivation models. As we’ll see later, a mission-statement is frequently misdescribed as ‘a vision’ – with unfortunate results in most cases. So what’s meant here by ‘Mission’ is a simple description of a capability or service to be created (via Goals) and maintained indefinitely thereafter. A Mission has two distinct phases: the initial stage when it’s created, and the subsequent phase of continuous operation. (There’s also a third phase for wind-down when the Mission ends.) In that sense, it’s like a trade-mission, not a one-off military mission – in fact the latter is really a type of Goal. And we’ll often need different people, and certainly different Goals, for each phase. In motivation terms, the Mission description’s job is straightforward: it tells us how we will deliver the Role. This is one place where we must have measurements – the whole collection of KPIs, KSCs, SLAs and all those other wonderful acronyms. These metrics tell us whether we’re on track in delivering our Role to the Vision-world. But note that we don’t actually ‘achieve’ a Mission: we measure it instead.
• #16: One key point is that in most cases Missions aren’t just about us: they’re as much about our partners, the other Roles in the Vision-world, because those Missions are our points of contact with them. And the metrics associated with the Mission exist to monitor and manage that interaction. (For Missions that act solely within the organisation itself, the other Roles – ‘customers’, ‘suppliers’ and so on – are internal rather than external, but the same principle applies. This is the basis of concepts such as service-oriented architecture, for example.) Missions also need regular review, not only against their own metrics – the locus of continuous-improvement processes – but also compared against the respective Role, because each may change the other.
• #17: And here we arrive at concrete, tangible Goals – the day-to-day Ends of business-motivation. The description consists of two mandatory parts – the deliverables for the Goal, and the required start-date and completion-date – and an optional list of additional metrics to be checked on completion. A Goal must always contribute towards a Mission – it never exists in isolation. Although we say that the Goal completes at the end of its main activities, at its completion-date, there needs also to be a brief additional phase to capture ‘lessons learned’. Although all too often this phase is skipped, simply from pressure of other Goals, this is the only place where criteria for success or failure can be applied; and the information gleaned in this final phase provides key information for process reviews.
• #18: Goals are straightforward, immediately concrete and practical; they also provide clear boundaries of time, space and context, making it easier to concentrate on the task to hand. And well-constructed Goals provide a useful sense of urgency, of need to complete. By arranging Goals in hierarchies, with longer-term Goals (such as the creation of a new Mission) partitioned into smaller Goals through some kind of ‘work breakdown structure’, the same urgency can be maintained through much longer periods – which can greatly increase overall productivity. Cyclic models of the project lifecycle also remind us of the importance of that brief review-period that needs to occur after completion of the Goal. In TQM, for example, it’s the ‘Check’ phase, whilst in the Group Dynamics cycle it’s described as ‘Adjourning’, but the principle is the same in each case.
• #19: Once we understand the nature of Vision, of Role, of Mission, of Goal, we build strategy and tactics to tie the framework together. Through strategy, we review the continuous subtle changes needed in our Role, and create and maintain Missions to match. And tactics define the Goals and activities needed to support each Mission. Straightforward and simple, as such. Yet so often we’ll see strategies that simply don’t work. For example, Michael Porter, the guru of strategy-development, describes the common obsession with shareholder-value as “the Bermuda Triangle of strategy”. And the reason: strategies don’t work – in fact can’t work – if the Vision and Role aren’t framed correctly. This is why a systematic visioning process is so important.
• #20: Before we look at the visioning process, we must re-iterate one essential point: a market-pitch may feel like a Vision in some ways, but their business functions are entirely different – a pitch is a short-term appeal to the market, whilst a Vision is an unchanging anchor for the organisation itself. Never confuse these two functions, because doing so can literally be lethal to an organisation. More on that later. Identifying a valid Vision does take time, because it’s not so much a choice as a feeling . Look for hints of it in the organisation’s history; in the anecdotes and stories people tell each other; and in the real values that people express in their work. See the previous examples for typical phrasing for valid Visions – it’s not complicated. And to be certain that the phrasing of the Vision is right, again test the feeling: it should bring out an almost indignant response of “we do it because that’s who we are! ”
• #21: A Role is usually easier to identify than the Vision – though as you explore the sense of the Vision-world, remember to take note of all the implied Roles of other stakeholders, because an understanding of these becomes important later when creating and assessing the organisation’s Missions. For phrasing, again see the previous Role examples: it’s fairly straightforward. Overall, the Role will need to seem more considered than the Vision, more ‘thought-through’, but will still essentially be based in feeling – easy to recognise as a bright, assertive response of “but that’s what we do !”
• #22: To identify Missions and Goals, use a standard project or service-management methodology such as PRINCE2, PMBOK or ITIL. The phrasing of a Mission will often include key criteria, but they must always be measurable criteria – not fluffy ‘market-speak’ such as ‘the best’ or ‘premier’ or suchlike. In the same way phrasings for Goals should be validated against the classic ‘SMART’ checklist. There are several variations of meanings for the acronym, most of which would be useful here: the slide shows one example, but another would probably work as well.
• #23: Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the problems with visioning are around the framing of the Vision. When a Role is used as the ‘vision’, it just feels flat – the automatic response is “so what?”, rather than a true Vision’s feel of “I’d like to be a part of that!” Misframed Missions are commonly mistaken for ‘vision’ – “maximise shareholder value” is a classic example. Again, it confuses ends and means – and because it’s self-referential, the most likely response would be “Why? What’s in it for me ?” Using a Goal as a ‘vision’ is even worse: true, it is an end rather than a means, but all motivation is lost as soon as the Goal is reached. Not a good idea... And a subtle semantic problem, describing a concept of some desired ‘future state’ as ‘a vision’. It’s valid in its way, but it’s not the same as we’re concerned with here. A simple test: if it’s temporary, or narrow in scope – a ‘future-state architecture’, for example – then it’s not a Vision.
• #24: We’ll also see attempts at ‘vision’ which combine the previous errors. The first example here is a muddled mixture of a Role – something about providing security services – and the measures from a Mission – the “taking a lead” part – which ends up as something like more like a PR-slogan than a Vision. Key points: a Vision can’t be measured or achieved - it simply is . And if you’re going to use a measure – which you should only do for the framing of a Mission – then make sure that it is something that can be measured! The final example is a classic misuse of a marketing slogan: combining almost every possible mistake, it’s a near-perfect illustration of what not to do when defining a Vision. The “to be” tells us it’s a Role; the spurious measure of “the best” shows it’s also a Mission; “the century” means it’s also a Goal; and it’s entirely self-referential - there’s no space that can shared with partners, customers or anyone else – so it’s not a Vision. What it is is a mess... So it’s unfortunate that this is the style most often recommended in business books, and even in ‘standards’ such as the Business Motivation Model . Be warned: it doesn’t work. It simply cannot do the job that a Vision needs to do.
• #25: So, to summarise, this sequence of Vision, Role, Mission, Goal provides a framework for gives a complete audit-trail for business motivation. linking everyday activities all the way up to the organisation’s Vision – its ‘reason to be’. In principle we should be able to write a complete ‘purpose-statement’, in the form on the slide, for every activity in the organisation. We wouldn’t do this in practice, of course – it would be an enormous waste of effort, creating the same kind of dreaded paper-trail that killed early implementations of ISO-9000. But this framework does mean that whenever we do need to know the business purpose of what we’re doing, we can find out straight away. Being able to answer, with clarity and certainty, the question “Why are we doing this?” makes a big difference to business motivation. And that’s how we do it. Vision; Role; Mission; Goal.