“If you don’t know exactly where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?” – Steve Maraboli
In today’s disruptive VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) business environment it is critically important for organizations, teams, and individual contributors to have clarity on their vision of the future and what their long-term goals are.
This clear direction becomes a guiding beacon for building an effective VUCA strategic plan, one that clarifies your strategic intent and enables your organization to quickly make decisions and then take action in order to get there.
The Foundation for VUCA Strategic Planning
There are two foundational elements required effective VUCA strategic planning: Your core ideology and clarity around your envisioned future. Your long-term goals should be based on, and in alignment with, your mission, values, and purpose. Together these become the core ideology for your organization.
- Core Ideology – defining the mission, values, and purpose of the organization. As a previous article explained, these elements describe why the organization exists and what it stands for. With this foundational framework you will have greater clarity when making critical business decisions that impact the future of your organization.
However, before any strategic VUCA planning can begin we must also have clarity around the envisioned future state of the organization:
- Envisioned Future – defining a clear vision for what the organization aspires to become or achieve, and your long-term goals. These elements explain the desired future state of the organization, and the long-term goals you and your team are working towards achieving in order to get there.
Defining Your Envisioned Future: Vision and Goals
Articulating the envisioned future of your organization has two main components: a vision statement, and long-term goals:
- Vision – Your vision statement defines what the organization aspires to become or achieve. Based on the current status of your organization, an effective vision will articulate where you want to take your organization in the future. Because of this future focus, your vision statement often sounds much different from what the organization is today (mission statement).
A specific and compelling vision statement can and should help drive decisions and goal setting. This description of what the desired future state looks can be extremely powerful for strategic planning because it provides inspiration and direction, and a focal point for the mission statement and an overall goal or destination for the organization. A clear vision will also help to identify and define potential strategies; and clarify what is within or outside of the organization’s limits.
- Goals – The goals for your organization are brief, clear statements of significant outcomes to be accomplished within a longer timeframe, typically 3-5 years. A goal is defined with a broad, general, tangible, and descriptive statement – It does not say how to do something, but rather what the singular end-result will look like.
Goals are sometimes described as outcome statements that define what an organization is trying to accomplish both programmatically and organizationally. Some common examples of business goals are, grow profitability, maximize net income, improve customer loyalty, increase market share, etc. Note the brevity of these statements.
Goals are critical to your company’s success. Ultimately, your organization’s goals need to align with your vision, and support your mission, values and purpose. Together this planning foundation will propel each team member’s individual actions and decisions.
Goals Versus Objectives – What’s the Difference?
Business consultants love to develop complex models and invent proprietary terminology for each element of their frameworks. Strategic planning practitioners are no different. This often creates unnecessary confusion.
My bias is to keep things simple, defaulting to the most commonly used terms and definitions, and in the process hopefully making it easier to understand and adopt the VUCA strategic planning framework I’m proposing.
It has been my experience that most organizations, both large and small, public or private, do not understand the difference between a goal and an objective. As a result, they do not effectively communicate them to their teams. This has obvious negative ramifications when you think about the lost opportunity to cascade goals and objectives, and gain buy in, throughout an organization.
Here’s an explanation of the difference between goals and objectives to make sure there is no confusion or ambiguity when it comes to your long-term and short-term plans.
- A goal is a broad and long-term desired result you want to achieve. You might use company goals to inform yearly strategies and guide the direction of all your efforts.
- An objective, on the other hand, defines the specific, measurable actions individual employees or teams must take to achieve the overall goal. It is at the objective level that the ownership of the strategic plan shifts from organizational leaders to teams and individuals. This is where the actual work gets done!
- A goal is where you want to be, and objectives are the steps taken to reach the goal.
Timeframe-based View of Vision, Goals, Objectives
In strategic planning, all the elements need to fit together, and build from one to the next. In other words, your vision statement should inform your goals, which should then inform your objectives. To eliminate any lingering confusion about the differences between vision, goals, and objectives, here’s another way to look at it. Since all strategic plans are time-based, that becomes the key differentiator between these sometimes contradictory and synonymous terms.
- Vision – this is an aspirational statement that is not time-bounded. In fact, your vision may never actually be attained, but rather serves as an imagined picture of the future.
- Goals – these are broader and longer-term, typically 2-5 years in timeframe. Your strategic VUCA plan will undoubtedly have several goals.
- Objectives – the short-term, tactical action items to be accomplished within the next 12-24 months max. Each of your goals will have multiple objectives behind them, and they become a key component of the organization’s VUCA plan. Much more on that topic in future articles!
Next Step Towards Creating a VUCA Plan
In summary, your mission statement focuses on the present, and clarifies what the organization does and for whom. Your values define the core beliefs and provide moral guidance for the organization, becoming the operating system that determines how you get there. While your purpose defines “your why” to provide market-facing clarity on the value you deliver to your constituents.
Defining this core ideology for your organization creates a solid foundation and starting place for overall strategic planning to begin. It comes to life when you combine it with your envisioned future, to articulate a vision for what the organization aspires to become or achieve, and then defining your long-term goals in order to get there.
Organizations achieve their goals by creating strategic plans, within which they define the strategy, and key objectives the team must accomplish. Many organizations struggle with setting up actionable objectives. Next time I’ll share a methodology that I have successfully used for years – the SMARTER framework for setting objectives that get done.
-Onward