Established model
The envisioned future
Collins & Porras · 1996
A long-range goal paired with a vivid description of what it will be like to have arrived.
Its place in the frameworkVision Core›Vision Statement
What it does
The second half is the part usually skipped and the part that does the work: not the target but a passionate, concrete description of the achieved state, written as if it were already true. Its function is translation — turning a figure nobody feels into a picture people can hold and repeat.
- Reach for it when
- When a vision statement has been written and nobody can describe what would be different if it happened.
- Where it stops
- Vividness is not evidence. A description compelling enough to move an organisation is exactly as easy to write for the wrong future as the right one.
James C. Collins & Jerry I. Porras, “Building Your Company’s Vision”, Harvard Business Review, 1996.
Why it sits at Vision Statement
The future state the organisation is working towards — far enough away to be worth the effort, close enough to be reached, and specific enough that someone could tell whether it had been.
A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:
- The statementCollins & Porras on the envisioned future — an ambitious goal with a long horizon, paired with a vivid description of what reaching it looks like.
- ReachabilityKotter’s criteria for an effective vision — imaginable, desirable, feasible, focused, flexible and communicable — of which feasible is the one usually skipped.
- What it rules outThe strategy literature on choice as exclusion: a position that permits everything commits to nothing.
- ProgressKaplan & Norton on translating a long-horizon direction into measures that move within a planning cycle.
What it touches elsewhere
Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Vision Statement lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.
- Goal CoreLong term goals are the vision expressed at a horizon short enough to be planned against.
- Mission StatementThe mission describes the work being done now to close the distance the vision names.
- Brand CoreThe narrative carries the vision outward; where the two disagree, the narrative is what people believe.
- Time CoreA horizon is a date, and it belongs in the same planning rhythm as everything else with one.
Filed at the same place
These answer questions that arise at Vision Statement too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.
- BackcastingStart from the future you want, then work backwards to what would have had to happen for it to be reached.
Elsewhere in Vision Core
These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.
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