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Vision, Values and Goals – A Plea For Simplicity

It’s not hard to get right, if you don’t over complicate or over engineer the process. Vision Values and Goals (VVG), are a brilliantly effective way to create a coalescing force for change, generate growth momentum and give people a reason for coming to work that includes more than just a salary.

Below are some guidelines for the creation of meaningful Vision, Values and Goals.

1. A Vision is an aspirational, passionately held directional point of view that gives people sense of purpose. It might be expressed in 100 words or in a single line but its essence can be understood by everybody.
2. A Vision is not a ‘motherhood and apple pie’, alliterative, totally inclusive statement made up of a dozen sub-clauses contained within one mangled sentence.
3. Make sure you don’t over complicate things. In our experience it’s difficult for an organisation to talk about its Vision and Mission for very long without getting them muddled. A well articulated Vision will do.
4. Talk about values not culture. Culture is simply the organisational consequence of values, which are themselves behavioural norms that the organisation has chosen to make explicitly desirable.
5. Try to develop a maximum of 6 (fewer is good) Values, linked to set of identifiable behavioural indicators.
6. The whole organisation cannot understand a strategy. What they can understand are strategic goals, related to their part of the organisation that threads through to their personal objectives.
7. VVG are a three legged stool; any two out of three is as useless as none at all.
8. If you want to express them in a way that supports the business reason for their existence, organise them like this.

We will achieve our Goals through our Vision because of our Values

Written in this way they effectively connect with delivering any commercial imperative.

In summary, your Vision is a distinctive, future focused, ‘reason for being’, distilled into a statement. Your (strategic) Goals are the measurable objectives by which you will make progress towards that Vision. And your Values create an empowering behavioural framework that underpins everything you do.

How hard can it be?

Predaptive work with many organisations in creating and implementing their VVG, if you would like to arrange a no obligation discussion with one of our senior consultants on how we might help your organisation please contact:

Claudine McClean
T: +44 (0) 1789 734333
E: claudinem@predaptive.com