I asked six C-suite members to each write down what the organisation's vision meant for their function's priorities. The six answers were so different that the morning's agenda had to stop. It was the most productive two and a half hours of the entire engagement.
The same words, read by six different leaders, can produce six different strategic directions.
I was fifteen minutes into a strategy session with the six members of the C-suite of a diversified manufacturing group when I asked each of them, independently and without discussion, to write down in one sentence what the organisation’s vision meant for the priorities of their function over the next two years. The six answers I received were so materially different from each other that I stopped the agenda and spent the rest of the morning examining the gap. It was the most productive session of the two-day engagement.
The vision statement in question was well-crafted, professionally communicated, and had been endorsed by the full board. It read, in substance, as a declaration that the organisation would be the most trusted engineering solutions partner in the markets it served. Every member of the C-suite endorsed it. Every member understood something different by it. The CFO understood “most trusted” to mean financial reliability and predictability for investors. The CHRO understood it to mean being known as an employer that keeps its commitments to its people. The Chief Business Officer understood it to mean deepening the quality of client relationships in existing accounts. The Chief Technology Officer understood it to mean building technological credibility that made the organisation the first call for complex engineering problems. The Strategy Director understood it to mean becoming a thought leader in the sector. The COO understood it to mean operational excellence so consistently delivered that clients had no reason to question the organisation’s reliability. All of these are plausible readings. Not all of them point to the same priorities.
Why Vision Language Is Structurally Ambiguous
The ambiguity of vision language is not an accident of poor writing. It is, in many cases, an intended feature. Vision statements are produced in processes that require broad endorsement, and broad endorsement is most easily achieved by language that is aspirational enough to accommodate multiple interpretations. The statement that every leader can agree on is frequently the statement that every leader will interpret differently when they return to their function and translate it into priorities.
This is not a failure of vision-setting. It is a consequence of treating vision-setting as the primary alignment mechanism, when it is in fact only the first step of one. THE VISION CREATES A SHARED VOCABULARY. It does not create a shared interpretation. Creating a shared interpretation requires a different kind of conversation, one that is more specific, more conflictual, and more revealing of divergence than the vision-setting process was designed to produce. Most organisations do not have that conversation. They endorse the vision, communicate it to the organisation, and assume that the shared vocabulary represents shared understanding.
The cost of that assumption becomes visible in the divergent functional priorities it produces. When the CFO is making investment decisions based on a financial reliability interpretation of the vision, while the Chief Technology Officer is making investment proposals based on a technological credibility interpretation, and both are legitimately aligned to the vision’s language, the resource allocation process becomes a competition between different interpretations rather than an allocation process organised around an explicit strategic logic. The meetings at which this plays out are typically experienced as functional turf wars or personality clashes. They are actually THE CONSEQUENCE OF A VISION THAT WAS NEVER GIVEN A SHARED INTERPRETATION.
“The vision statement that every leader can endorse is very often the vision statement that every leader will interpret differently. The endorsement is real. The alignment it is assumed to represent is not.”
RK, Founder & Principal Consultant, ProventusHRWhat the Morning’s Conversation Revealed
When the six interpretations were read aloud in sequence, the first reaction in the room was a kind of surprised recognition. These were leaders who had been working together for two to five years, who had endorsed the same vision, and who had been operating on the assumption that their C-suite colleagues shared their understanding of what it meant. The revelation that they did not was not threatening in the way I had anticipated. It was, for most of them, a relief. It explained a specific quality of friction they had each been experiencing in cross-functional conversations: a sense that they were not quite talking about the same thing, even when the discussion was explicitly framed around the strategic direction.
I structured the conversation in two parts. The first part was descriptive: each leader explained the reasoning behind their interpretation, what in their function’s reality had shaped the way they read the vision. This part of the conversation was illuminating and mostly non-conflictual. The interpretations were not arbitrary. They were grounded in each leader’s legitimate view of the most important challenge their function faced. The problem was not that any individual interpretation was wrong. The problem was that five of the six were being treated as the primary interpretation by the leader who held it.
The second part was more demanding: I asked the group to identify the interpretation, or the combination of interpretations, that best served the organisation’s actual strategic position at this moment. This required the group to make explicit choices about relative priority, which is always the harder conversation. The CFO’s financial reliability interpretation and the Chief Business Officer’s client relationship deepening interpretation were ultimately identified as the primary interpretive frame for the next eighteen months, with the CTO’s technological credibility interpretation as the enabling condition. The CHRO’s employer trust interpretation was recognised as important for talent strategy but not as the leading edge of the external positioning. The Strategy Director’s thought leadership interpretation was deferred to a second phase. The COO’s operational excellence interpretation was agreed to be the foundation beneath all the others rather than a competing frame.
What This Revealed About How the Organisation Had Been Operating
When I reviewed the cross-functional tensions the organisation had been experiencing against the interpretive map we had produced in the morning, the causal logic was clear. Two of the three most persistent cross-functional conflicts in the organisation mapped directly to interpretive divergences that had never been surfaced or addressed. THE STRATEGY DIRECTOR’S THOUGHT LEADERSHIP AGENDA had been creating friction with the CFO’s financial discipline agenda because both leaders believed they were the one most faithfully pursuing the vision. The CHRO’s employer brand investments had been experienced by the COO as an operational cost that conflicted with efficiency priorities, because the two leaders were operating from interpretations that had never been explicitly reconciled.
The morning did not resolve these tensions entirely. Resolution requires structural decisions about resource allocation and priority that the morning’s conversation provided a basis for but did not make. What it did produce was a shared frame in which the conflicts could be understood as interpretive divergences requiring explicit arbitration by the CEO, rather than as personality or functional conflicts that were essentially irresolvable. The quality of the C-suite’s conversation for the rest of the two-day engagement was materially different as a result.
The insight I take from engagements like this is a simple one: THE VISION ALIGNMENT CONVERSATION IS THE BEGINNING OF STRATEGY WORK, not the conclusion of it. Organisations that treat it as the conclusion are building on a foundation that looks solid and is not. The fractures become visible in exactly the places where the organisation needs its leadership to be most coherent: resource allocation decisions, cross-functional collaboration, and the interpretation of the strategy for the teams below the leadership level who are trying to work out what it actually means for their daily work.
“Endorsing a vision together does not mean understanding it together. The most useful thing I did in this engagement was ask the C-suite to write down what the vision meant before I asked them to discuss what it required.”
RK, Founder & Principal Consultant, ProventusHRResearch Reference
McKinsey, “The Mindsets and Practices of Excellent CEOs,” McKinsey Quarterly, 2021. ProventusHR field observations across C-suite alignment engagements, 2023 to 2025. Roger Martin, “Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works,” HBR Press, 2013.
The ProventusHR Perspective
The diagnostic exercise described in this Field Note, asking C-suite members to write their interpretation of the vision independently before discussing it collectively, is one of the most consistently productive opening moves in our strategy alignment engagements. It surfaces divergences that would otherwise remain implicit for the duration of the workshop and the months following it. We use variations of this exercise at multiple levels of the organisation, including with the layer below the C-suite, where the interpretive divergences are often even more significant and more consequential for execution.
ProventusHR’s vision interpretation work is structured around the recognition that alignment is not a binary state. Organisations are not either aligned or misaligned. They are aligned to different degrees on different dimensions, and the dimensions that matter most for execution are those that are most often left unexamined. Our engagement model includes explicit structure for the vision interpretation conversation, typically in the first half-day of any strategy alignment engagement, before any strategic content is introduced. The content is only useful if the frame for interpreting it is shared. The frame is only shared if the divergences have been surfaced and addressed. That sequencing is the foundation on which all the rest of our culture and strategy alignment work is built.
About the Author
Founder Director, ProventusHR · MGSCC Master Coach · NDA Alumnus
Founder of ProventusHR and principal architect of ExperienceLearning and REEL|Life. 25+ years across leadership advisory, executive coaching, and experiential design across 14 industries. 9x Brandon Hall HCM Excellence Award winner (2022 to 2025).
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