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What it rules out

The opportunities the vision makes it wrong to take — without which it cannot settle an argument, which is the only thing a vision is used for under pressure.

The idea

How it works

A vision is consulted at exactly one moment: when two attractive options cannot both be taken. If it is compatible with both, it settles nothing and will be quoted by whichever side is losing the argument.

The test is to name an opportunity the organisation has actually declined because of the vision. Where no such occasion exists, the vision has never been used, whatever role it is described as playing.

Working with it

In practice

  1. 01

    Name three things it excludes

    Specific opportunities, markets or ways of working. If the list is hard to produce, the vision is too broad to decide anything.

  2. 02

    Record the decisions it has settled

    The occasions where it actually decided something are the evidence that it works.

  3. 03

    Watch for exclusions being quietly reopened

    Each exception looks reasonable; the sum of them is a vision that permits everything again.

  4. 04

    Accept that exclusions cost money

    A vision that has never cost the organisation an attractive opportunity has never been binding.

One level in

The components of what it rules out

A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.

  1. The exclusions

    What the vision makes it wrong to pursue, named specifically.

    Learn

  2. The decisions settled

    Occasions where the vision actually decided something, with what was declined.

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  3. The pressure

    Where exclusions are being reopened, and how often exceptions have been granted.

    Learn

Name an opportunity the vision caused you to decline. If there is none, the vision has never been used.

The other modules in vision statement

The statement

The articulation itself: a future state with a horizon attached, written so that someone outside the room could tell whether it had been reached.

Learn

Reachability

Whether the vision is actually attainable, on what horizon, and what would have to become true first — the half that separates ambition from fantasy.

Learn

Progress

Whether the organisation is closer than it was, established on evidence rather than on activity — because a decade-long vision is otherwise unexamined for a decade.

Learn
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