There is a specific kind of organisational activity that consumes significant leadership time, produces a document that is framed and displayed prominently, and changes almost nothing about how decisions are actually made or how the organisation actually behaves. It is the vision and values exercise, and its prevalence is a reliable indicator that the organisation has confused the production of aspirational language with the development of genuine strategic direction.
The confusion is understandable. Vision statements and strategy documents occupy similar positions in the organisational communication hierarchy. Both are produced through senior leadership processes. Both are communicated to the organisation with similar fanfare. Both are referenced in town halls and leadership development programmes as evidence of organisational clarity and direction. The difference is in what they actually produce: a vision statement describes where the organisation aspires to be; a strategy describes the specific choices about where to compete, where not to compete, and what capabilities to build, that will get it there. One is aspirational; the other is operational. One can be produced without making difficult trade-off decisions; the other cannot.
Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley’s formulation in Playing to Win is the most precise available definition of strategy: a set of integrated choices about winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, what capabilities are required, and what management systems are needed. Every element of this definition is incompatible with the vague, positive, inclusive language that characterises most vision and values exercises. A genuine strategy makes choices that exclude alternatives, which means it makes some people in the organisation uncomfortable by telling them that the resources and attention will be directed elsewhere. A vision statement, almost by definition, is designed to include everyone and make them feel that their work is valued and their direction is aligned. The two documents are doing fundamentally different things, and conflating them produces the specific failure mode of organisations that know where they aspire to be and have no coherent account of how to get there.
The five ways vision statements substitute for strategy
The specific mechanisms through which vision and values exercises substitute for genuine strategic clarity are worth naming, because they are consistent across organisations and across sectors, and because naming them is the first step toward avoiding them.
The first mechanism is the false consensus that broad aspirational language produces. A vision that aspires to be the most trusted and most innovative organisation in its sector, while sounding positive and ambitious, requires no one to agree on what trust and innovation actually mean in operational terms, who is responsible for producing them, what resources will be directed toward them, or what will be stopped doing to create the space and focus required. Everyone can endorse it precisely because it commits to nothing specific. The consensus it produces is not the consensus of aligned judgment about how to compete. It is the consensus of shared aspiration whose operational implications have been carefully avoided.
The second mechanism is the substitution of cultural ambition for competitive logic. Many organisations respond to competitive challenge not by developing a more coherent account of how they will win in their market but by refining their articulation of the values and purpose that make them the organisation they aspire to be. This is not entirely without value. Clarity about purpose and values does support genuine cultural alignment and does influence the decisions that people make in the absence of specific strategic guidance. But it does not substitute for the specific competitive logic that tells the organisation where to deploy its finite resources and capabilities to produce the outcomes the strategy is designed to deliver.
The third mechanism is the use of vision and values work to manage organisational anxiety about change rather than to produce genuine strategic direction. When the external environment changes in ways that threaten the organisation’s current competitive position, the response that requires the least disruption to existing power structures and existing ways of working is the articulation of a new vision rather than the development of a genuinely different strategy. The vision gives the organisation the feeling of having responded to the change without requiring the difficult choices about what to stop doing, where to disinvest, and what new capabilities to build that genuine strategic response would require.
The fourth mechanism is the confounding of cultural alignment with strategic alignment. An organisation in which everyone understands and endorses the values is genuinely culturally aligned. It is not thereby strategically aligned, because strategic alignment requires not only shared values but a shared, specific, operational understanding of the choices the organisation has made about where to compete and how to win. These are different kinds of alignment requiring different kinds of work to achieve, and conflating them produces an organisation that feels aligned and that lacks the specific shared understanding of competitive direction that genuine strategy requires.
The fifth mechanism is the use of external facilitation of vision and values work as a signal of strategic seriousness. Commissioning a values exercise, engaging a respected facilitator, investing senior leadership time in the process, and communicating the outputs with the appropriate ceremony are all behaviours that signal strategic engagement. They do not produce it. The organisation that mistakes the signal for the substance has invested significant resource in producing the appearance of strategic clarity rather than the reality of it.
What genuine strategy requires that vision cannot produce
The specific things that genuine strategy requires are incompatible with the inclusive, aspirational character of vision and values work, and understanding this incompatibility is more useful than simply criticising the prevalence of vision exercises.
Genuine strategy requires explicit prioritisation, which means explicit de-prioritisation. The resources and attention that will be directed toward the strategic priority are resources and attention that will not be directed toward something else. This is a loss for the people and the functions whose work is being de-prioritised, and they will experience it as such. The vision and values exercise that produces a document everyone can endorse is not the exercise that makes this prioritisation explicit. The strategy conversation that makes it explicit will be more uncomfortable, will produce more resistance, and will require more sustained leadership courage to maintain than the vision exercise. It will also produce the genuine strategic clarity that the vision exercise cannot.
Genuine strategy also requires specific accountability for specific outcomes. The vision that aspires to customer centricity, innovation, and trust is not organisationally actionable until someone is specifically accountable for producing a specific and measurable improvement in a specific indicator of each aspiration by a specific date with specific resources. Converting vision into accountability requires the kind of specific operational thinking that is both more demanding and less exciting than the vision articulation that precedes it. It is also the only part of the process that actually changes how the organisation operates.
How to tell the difference in practice
The diagnostic question that most reliably distinguishes genuine strategic work from vision substitution is this: what did we choose not to do? Genuine strategy makes choices that exclude alternatives. The organisation that can answer this question specifically, naming the markets it decided not to enter, the capabilities it decided not to build, the customer segments it decided not to serve, has been doing genuine strategic work. The organisation that cannot answer it has been producing vision.
The second diagnostic is the resource allocation question: does the distribution of actual resources, time, money, and senior attention, reflect the priorities stated in the strategy? An organisation whose stated strategic priority is innovation but whose senior leadership time is dominated by operational efficiency management, and whose capital allocation is primarily directed toward optimising existing businesses, has produced a vision of innovation rather than a strategy for it. The real strategy is visible in the resource allocation even when the stated strategy says something different.
How to run a strategy conversation that actually produces strategy
The conversation that produces genuine strategy, as distinct from the vision exercise that produces aspirational language, has specific features that distinguish it from the standard strategy offsite format. It begins with an honest, evidence-based assessment of the organisation’s current competitive position: not what the organisation aspires to be, but what it actually is, where it actually wins and loses, and what the specific gaps between its current capability and the capability required by its competitive context actually are. This diagnostic starting point is less exciting than the aspiration starting point and more difficult to facilitate, because it requires engaging with evidence that may be uncomfortable and with honest assessments that may challenge the current leadership’s assumptions about the organisation’s strengths. It is also the only starting point that produces the specific strategic choices that genuine strategy requires. The organisation that does not know honestly where it currently is cannot make credible choices about where it should go next or what it will need to do differently to get there.
The conversation then needs to produce specific choices that are genuinely mutually exclusive: the markets we will not serve, the capabilities we will not build, the customer segments we will not pursue. These choices are the evidence that the conversation has produced genuine strategy rather than an expanded vision. An organisation that can say specifically what it has chosen not to do has made a strategic choice. An organisation that can only say what it aspires to do has produced a vision. The facilitation courage required to hold a strategy conversation to the standard of genuine mutual exclusivity, when the social pressure to accommodate all positions through sufficiently broad language is very strong, is the specific facilitation capacity that most strategy offsites lack.
A vision statement tells you where an organisation wants to be. A strategy tells you the specific choices it has made about how to get there. The first can be produced through consensus and aspiration. The second requires the courage to make choices that not everyone will like, and the discipline to hold to them when the discomfort of those choices becomes intense enough to invite revision.