10 minutes on vision

Editor's Notes

• #3: What should we do now? How should we spend our money the next quarter? Is this proposal good or bad? Are we doing good or bad?
• #4: The vision statement of an organisation is a dream, a vision of a better future. The vision statement is paramount to get everyone to understand where we are going and a good vision statement acts like a compass for an all members of an organisation. Helping us to know where we are going. Helping us to keep on our course and make sure that we get closer and closer to our goal.
• #5: Without a vision statement we stand the risk of our efforts being wasted as we pull towards different directions. We miss the goal completely… or even worse: our good intentions are in vain.
• #6: My name is Marcus Hammarberg and I work for the Salvation Armys Health Foundation in Indonesia. We have 6 hospitals and 15 clinics spread out through Indonesia. During the last couple of we have been talking a lot about mission, vision and strategic plans. Having a strong vision is very important to make sure that every part of an organisation is pulling towards the same goal.
• #7: In the last presentation we talked about the mission statement that talks about WHY we are here. The basic purpose of our organisation. This time Vision is the topic at hand. Vision gives the organisation a common goal to focus it’s joint efforts to reach. HOW to get there is the topic for next presentation on strategic plans.
• #8: What does the word vision mean? It talks about seeing, being able to see. But also as having a vision, a sight into the future. Or a picture in your mind.
• #9: Bringing it back to business terms it’s easiest to talk about vision in contrast to the Mission that we talked about last time. In relation to Mission, that talked about our Purpose or reason to exist, a Vision statement is a Goal description. A post-card from the future if you want. This is why many vision statements starts with “We will be”, “Becoming” or “Reaching”
• #10: This is also the reason a Mission statement is so important. Because the Vision statement builds on the Mission. One way to express this, that Commissioner Mike Parker often use is this: The vision is a description of how it will look when we are executing the Mission perfectly. You can say that the vision is one of the possible futures that we can end up in, given our Purpose. By stating the vision clearly we make sure that we all, at least, know which future we are aiming for.
• #11: From this we can understand that the vision doesn’t have to be something that we WILL reach. It can be a future state that we never will get too, but still something that inspire us to be better and better. A vision is more about direction and alignment. This is why I like the metaphor about a compass. The vision shows us where to go, and we can use it to check if we are still on the correct route
• #12: With a good vision and compass we can make sure that our efforts are used better. We want to be effective - reaching our goal. Not until everyone knows the goal, share the vision is it interesting to care about efficiency - using our resources wisely. Keeping people busy without making sure that we are striving and reaching our goal is both demotivating, cruel and pointless. As an example, consider a car having the gas pedal fixed to the floor but not put it in gear. The engine runs efficient - but we’re not getting anywhere. We’re not reaching our goal. We are not effective. To be effective we need to know which way we should go.
• #13: Just as with Mission statements, our vision statements can sometimes be a little bit hard to understand and put into practical use. Which really is a shame since that’s the whole purpose of the vision statement: to help the organisation know where to go. In fact, the vision statement itself makes the understanding of the Mission more clear
• #14: But what about the Vision statement, our goal. How can we make examples of that? One way that I’ve found very useful is to start to think about what we are going to measure to know if we are getting closer or further away from our goal, our vision state. For example, if our goal is to build a car that runs 300 km/h it’s easy; check the speedometer. We can measure other things too, of course, fuel efficiency use, friction on tires etc. But the overall goal is to run 300 km/h - so the main measurement is speed.
• #15: To clarify this questioning a little bit let me tell a story about Sir Frank Williams that led the Williams Formula 1 stable for many years. For every decision in his organisation he evaluated them with one question: Does it make the car go faster? That was the goal. The fastest car wins the cup. Everything they did aimed for this one thing: Make the car go faster. We want to add a new commercial on our car! Good - does it make the car go faster? Eeeeh - well… it will send out the message that our car is cool. And that might attract the best engineers. And that will make the car go faster.
• #16: Notice, from this example, we realise that it’s not the answer itself that is most important but the deeper, better shared understanding of the goal that comes from reasoning about the question: “What can we measure to see if we’re getting closer or further away from the goal”
• #17: Let’s test it out: Let’s say that our vision is to “Become the best small hospital in Bandung, know for our quality and patient foucs” What should we measure to see if we are getting closer or further away from this goal? Well, first of all what is “small”? Let’s define that - or we don’t know who we compare ourselves against. Secondly: “best” - for the metrics we define we need to know about the metrics of our competitors. Only Bandung? Well, yes, that’s where we are, right? We need to define some metrics around quality? Maybe get basic medical measurements, but also customer satisfaction. Through surveys maybe. But “quality”… that can mean many things? Are we considering quality for staff too? Yes? let’s measure staff satisfaction. Financial quality? No? Really? How … Pastoral care Patient focus - this can be measured in how much time we spend with our patients. The more the better, according to this vision. Now, this was just a quick example, but I’m sure you can see how you and I now understand better what the original statement meant. Maybe it even gave us some ideas on how to get there? Or how to revise the Vision Statement
• #18: In doing this you will certaintly find things that is hard to measure. You might even find things that cannot be measured at all. Or so it’s claimed. Sometimes I heard things like: “Well the service that we are providing is such that it doesn’t manifests itself in hard numbers” One really good example of this is “Pastoral ministry” that is something I’ve struggled with myself. That cannot be measured, right?
• #19: In this case: first buy and secondly read the book How to measure anything by Dr Douglas W. Hubbard. It talks exactly about this. Dr Hubbards response to “This cannot be measured” is a question. “If the service we provide cannot be measured in any way, how do you know if you are supplying value or not? There has to be some observable consequence of our job, if that matter at all”
• #20: That book also gives us a nice thought experiment to come up with how to measure things that are really hard to measure. Imagine that we could make a clone of the organisation and take away the one aspect we are interested in, in the cloned organisation. For example, pastoral ministry. In our thought experiment we now we have 2 organisations (hospitals): one with pastoral ministry. One without.
• #21: Now we run the two organisations for a 1 year. What will be the difference? That’s the thing we are going to measure. There should be some effect right? Why do we do X otherwise? Again, with my example of Pastoral Care. Well if we have one organisation with Pastoral care and one without there should be more signs of Jesus after one year in the one over the other.
• #22: Now, how on earth do we measure that? Well, we can do it simple and just count the number of meetings, pastoral interventions, morning prayers etc. That’s very good, but that’s not proving anything of Jesus. It just says that we’ve done activities. Not reached the outcome: “more of Jesus”. This is something emphasised by General Andre Cox. Focus on Outcomes more than activities.
• #23: So what could we measure? First, let’s ask the pastor (or Salvation Army officer in our case) - they probably have good ideas about what we can measure. We could also just do a survey and ask people. Often I find this very telling. Just because we measure something doesn’t mean that we need to come up with exact numbers, just indications can be enough. “Do you feel closer to Jesus today” “Can you feel that Jesus is present more in our hospital today?”
• #24: Again, let’s take a look at a couple of examples of vision statements and see if why are good
• #25: Remember the Mission of Walmart? Here’s their vision. We can see how it is built on the mission statement, their purpose. We also, get a little surprised maybe, but this is one of the futures that Walmart envisions. Can you think of ways to measure that, to see if they are getting closer or further away?
• #26: The International Salvation Army mission was short. The vision is longer, but can be summed up in: One army, One mission, One message. Let’s just peak into one of those; One Mission: I like that they give a little introduction that further explains what “One Mission” means. Then they actually list the focus areas. It’s easy to see the focus and understand what it means. It would be easy to come up with measurements to help us know if we are getting closer or further away
• #27: SILOAM Hopsitals had a short and sweet mission statement. The vision statement is more of the same. Short concise and to the point. With very short vision statement comes more responsibilities to make sure that it’s well communicated to make everyone pull towards the same goal. Or… to accept that it can be interpreted differently. This is ok for many organisations as long as the mission is well understood.
• #28: Yayasan Pelayanan Kesehatan Bala Keselamatan had a very long mission statement. The vision, the goal, the compass is shorter. But from it we can see that it is built on the mission. There’s a lot of things in this vision statement that leaves us with questions maybe, but we can ask the questions about what to measure to clarify that.
• #29: Let’s summarise: The Mission statement tells us WHY the organisation exists our Purpose The Vision statements talks about a goal, a vision of the future. Without it we stand the risk that we are doing good work towards the wrong goal. We are efficient but not effective. With a vision statement the organisation gets a compass with which we can evaluate A great way to make sure that we are understanding the vision the same way is to give examples of what we could measure to see if we are getting closer or further away from the vision.
• #30: My name is Marcus Hammarberg. This has been 10 minutes on Vision statements. Thank you for listening. Tuhan Memberkati Anda - God Bless you.