1. How to Write Your Vision Statement
your vision statement outlines where your business is headed. Because it's about where you're going, it is future-oriented. At the same time, it provides a guiding light for the day-to-day work of your business.
Step 1: What is a Vision Statement?
Before you can write your vision statement, it's a good idea to know what you're working on.
A vision statement can be between one line and several paragraphs long. It provides direction and inspiration for your company. It sets out your most important goals, but doesn't include a practical plan to achieve those goals.
It outlines how you help people, the value you offer to the world, and what you plan to achieve as a business.
Ideally, a vision statement should be written in ordinary, everyday language that is meaningful to you, your customers, and your employees. Where possible, avoid business jargon.
A vision statement is:
• Aspirational in that it's about your goals. Once you achieve your vision, you'll need to write a new vision statement.
• Inspirational in that it provides life and direction to your day-to-day work (the root of the word “inspiration” relates to breathing life into things).
• Motivational in that it provides a reason for the work you do.
Step 2: Revisit Your Strategic Plan
Everything you need to write your vision statement is in your strategic plan. If you've already started work on your strategic plan, you can go back through what you've done. Otherwise, you'll need to work on the following:
• Your elevator pitch. This outlines what you do and how you help people. For this exercise, you may want to expand on your elevator pitch, going into more depth.
• Your business values. Your values can form part of your business statement, especially if you're still moving toward a place where your business reflects your values. Even if your values don't explicitly make it into your vision statement, they should be present below the surface, informing everything you write.
• Your business goals. Goals are a key part of your vision statement. Only include the business goals that reflect the essence of your business. For the purpose of your vision statement, it's a good idea to look for patterns in your goals and combine them into a single aspiration. The down-to-earth part of how you'll achieve this big goal comes later, in your mission statement.
• Your business strengths and opportunities. Your vision statement can include maintaining your current strengths or taking advantage of new opportunities.
• Your business story. Your story gives your business an identity. As with your values, your story may not be explicit in your vision statement, but it should be present, supporting your vision statement.
Step 3: Make a Vision Board
Everything you've collected from your strategic plan forms your vision board. This is the mixing pot out of which you'll write your vision statement.
You can expand on your vision board by writing detailed answers to the following questions:
• Who does your business help?
• What's the purpose of your business?
• How do you want to make the world a better place with your business?
• What problems does your business solve?
• What's your ultimate aim for your business?
Additionally, if you're a visual person, you may find it helpful to collect pictures of successful businesses you admire that serve the world in a similar way to your business. Images can help you discover vibe, energy, and words you might not have thought of to include in your vision statement.
Step 4: Distill to the Essentials
You've collated a ton of information in your vision board. Work through everything you've collected, and discard anything that's not absolutely core to your business. You will need to be ruthless. Remember that anything you discard can form part of your business plan.
After you've finished this step, you'll have the skeleton of your vision statement.
Step 5: Write
Take the skeleton of your vision statement, and craft it into something special.
• Use short words and sentences to keep it engaging. In general, the shorter the better for everything in your vision statement, including the vision statement itself.
• Limit yourself to concrete language. Remember the lesson from writing an elevator pitch? If you can't put it in a wheelbarrow, it's not concrete language.
• Focus on what your business does for others - how you help your customers and inspire your employees.
It's totally okay to make a mess! If you come up with ten different ideas for your vision statement, keep them. You'll need to choose one, but you don't have to do that yourself.
Step 6: Ask for Feedback
Next, take what you've created to ask others what they think. Get feedback from your mastermind group, your customers, your employees, and friends and family.
Ask everyone to be honest, but bear in mind that anyone you ask may be positive out of kindness. Look for genuine enthusiasm, and beware of reserved endorsements.
After you've collected your feedback, choose the best vision statement. Don't freak out if it's not perfect! You don't have to keep this forever; there's always room for improvement in the future.
Step 7: Continually Review
Your vision statement is continually up for review. That doesn't mean you need to think about changing it every day. But it does mean that any time you think of a way to improve your vision statement, you can update it.
Your vision statement grows with your business. If your business gets too big for your vision statement, it's time to get a new one.
http://business.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-write-vision-and-mission-statements--cms-43
How to Write Vision and Mission Statements
by David Masters23 Dec 2013
Getting StartedThey need to be specific to your business and describe a unique outcome that only you can provide. Generic vision statements that could apply to any organisation won’t cut it (see our examples below for more on this point).
1. Do not use words that are open to interpretation. For example, saying you will ‘maximise shareholder return’ doesn’t actually mean anything unless you specify what it actually looks like.
2. Keep it simple enough for people both inside and outside your organisation to understand. No technical jargon, no metaphors and no business buzz-words if at all possible!
3. It should be ambitious enough to be exciting but not too ambitious that it seems unachievable. It’s not really a matter of time-framing your vision, because that will vary by organisation, but certainly anything that has a timeframe outside of 3 to 10 years should be challenged as to whether it’s appropriate.
4. It needs to align to the Values that you want your people to exhibit as they perform their work. We’ll talk more about Values in a future article – but once you’ve created those Values later on, revisit your Vision to see how well they gel.
Following these rules should give you a pretty good starting point for creating your own vision statement.
The Process
There are literally hundreds of articles out there that will give you examples of good and bad vision statements as well as a high-level overview of what to consider when creating your own. But what we noticed was lacking was a concrete process to go through to help you create one. As such, we’ve outlined a process that we have used with clients in Cascade that might work for you too.
There are plenty of great vision statements out there that will not conform to the process below – but if you’re struggling or just need a place to start, then hopefully this will help.
Step 1: Define what you do as an output
Start by being exceptionally clear about what it is your organisation actually does. Be careful to remain ‘output focused’ rather than ‘input focused’. For example, Apple famously had a vision statement to Put an Apple computer on every desk in the world (slightly paraphrased). Strictly speaking what Apple ‘do’ is make computers, but for the purposes of their Vision, they looked forward to the actual outcome of this process – i.e. computers on desks.
Let’s look at some other hypothetical examples:
A bakery makes bread. But the outcome is consumers enjoying that bread.
A consulting company gives advice. But the outcome is the success of others based on that advice.
A government department does…lots of things. But the outcome is better lives for the citizens they serve.
Whilst this process may seem obvious – you would be surprised by how rarely organisations actually go through this process in a formal, written way. Doing so will take you a long way towards creating your vision statement – BUT it’s not enough alone! If it was, all bakeries for example would have the same vision statement – which is hardly inspiring!
Step 2: Define what unique twist your organisation brings to the above outcome
Very few products or services these days are truly new – most are more like reinventions of something that exists already, but with a different approach, focus or spin.
At some point in your organisation’s lifespan – someone will have believed that the reason that THIS organisation would be successful where others have failed, was because of………something.
You need to define that something!
Let’s take our bakery example. So far, our vision statement is looking pretty generic, along the lines of customers enjoying our bread. But why will they enjoy our bread MORE than the bread from the place next door? Is it because we use centuries old traditions passed through generations of our family? Because we only use premium grade locally sourced ingredients? Whatever your unique selling point is – let it shine through in your vision statement.
Step 3: Apply some high-level quantification
A common problem with vision statements is ironically, that they are too visionary! With no possible end in sight (or a totally unrealistic one) – the initial inspiration derived from a great vision statement can