Making Vision Stick

Andy Stanley

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9780310313182
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Leadership

There are lots of books about discovering or developing a vision for your organization, but this one is about making that vision endure the corrosion of time and complexity--how to make your vision stick.

Influential author and pastor Andy Stanley reveals the reasons why leaders' visions often falter, and he delivers 5 in-depth strategies so that you can dodge the pitfalls:

• How to state your vision simply.
• How to cast your vision convincingly.
• How to repeat your vision regularly.
• How to celebrate your vision systematically.
• How to embrace your vision personally.

Many of us have good ideas, even great ones. The difficult part is putting them into practice and keeping that vision clear and visible to your organization--whether that's a business or a church--when there are so many things in the day-to-day living of that vision that can distract from it.

Making Vision Stick offers valuable, practical tips and case studies. This is a book you'll want to highlight and dog-ear and pass around as you learn how to propel your organization toward the vision God has granted you.

Vision is about what could be and should be, but life is about right this minute. The test of a true leader is in keeping that vision on track, day in and day out.

In February 2007, Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz sent a memo to his CEO, Jim Donald, that somehow found its way onto the Internet and consequently onto the computer screens of Starbucks fans everywhere. Three people copied me on it in a single day.

In the memo, Schultz expresses concern that his company has veered from its original charter. He cites a series of internal decisions that eventually led to a dilution of what customers had come to expect from a visit to Starbucks. By unintentionally altering the Starbucks experience, decision makers in the company had allowed America’s premier coffee-drinking environment to drift from its mission. It was clear from the memo that this was not simply a corporate concern. For Schultz it was personal. He urges his CEO to create a course that will lead Starbucks back to its original vision. This candid memo underscores the point of this little book and serves as a reminder that vision doesn’t stick without constant care and attention.

One of the greatest challenges of leadership is making vision stick. Vision doesn’t have much adhesive. Regardless of how clear I think I’ve made the vision and in spite of my commitment to repeat it often, someone will inevitably ask a question or offer a suggestion that makes me wonder, “Where have you been? Have you not been paying attention?”

When speaking to leaders on the subject of vision, I like to joke that the three primary obstacles to making vision stick are success, failure, and everything in between.There is no season in which a leader can push autopilot and expect the organization to remain vision-driven. It is possible for an organization to increase market share and profit margins while drifting from its original vision. I know from personal experience that it is possible for a church to grow numerically while drifting further and further away from the founding vision that energized the original team of leaders. The gravitational pull is always to the left or right of center. Success lures us into taking our hands off the wheel. Failure causes us to overcorrect. Both success and failure can lead to disaster.

The passage of time is hard on vision. Over time organizations become more complex. Complexity is distracting for leaders. Where there were once two balls to juggle, suddenly there are three, then four, and then forty. All of them are important. Where once there was one good opportunity to pursue, suddenly there are three. And each new opportunity leads to yet another and another. Complexity can kill the original vision.

General Motors is a good example. For over fifty years, GM dominated the American car industry with a market share that hovered at 50 percent. The architect of the vision that rejuvenated GM was Alfred Sloan. His idea back in 1924 was simple: Create five separate brands and price ranges for five distinct types of car buyers. Chevrolet was branded and priced for the first-time car buyer. Pontiac was branded and priced as an upgrade from a Chevrolet. From there a car buyer could upgrade to an Oldsmobile, then a Buick, and, finally, a Cadillac.

This approach took several years to catch on, but when it did, GM became king of the American car industry. Along with the growth of GM came unavoidable complexity. In the midst of the complexity, the simplicity and focus of the original vision were lost. The price points among brands began to overlap. Before long, GM brands were competing with each other for the same customers. As brand clarity diminished, so did market share. Now a Chevrolet is anything from a $10,000 Aveo to a $60,000 Corvette. A Cadillac can be anything from a sports car to an SUV. As brand distinction diminished, so did market share. GM, the world’s number one maker of cars and trucks, lost twenty points of U.S.market share in the last twenty-five years.

It’s tough to make vision stick. Time has a way of eroding the adhesive. The forces that slowly eroded the adhesive of Alfred Sloan’s vision for GM are working against you and your organization as well. Vision is about what could be and should be, but life is about right this minute. As important as we believe it is for people in our organizations to embrace our pictures of the future, their lives are consumed with the present. Life is about deadlines and decisions and problem solving, not to mention the kids and the house and the bills and the yard. To get people to sit still long enough to understand your vision is hard enough. But to get them to actually organize their lives around it is supremely difficult. The urgent and legitimate needs of today quickly erase our commitment to the what could be of tomorrow.

As the keeper of the vision, there’s a lot working against you. Actually, it’s worse than that. Just about everything is working against you. Success. Failure. Time.Life. But if, in spite of all that, there’s something in you that refuses to give up and settle for the status quo, you may very well be the person God will use to bring about change. It’s possible that God shares your anguish and your passion to make your vision stick.

In the following pages I’m going to download what I’ve learned over the last twenty years about making vision stick. This certainly isn’t everything there is to know about this important subject. It’s just all I know.

This is not a book about discovering or developing vision. My assumption is that you’ve done the difficult work of crafting a statement or paragraph that describes the preferred future for your organization. If not, you may want to dog-ear this page, gather your team, and spend the time necessary to develop a vision statement. If you’ve already done that, then let’s figure out how to make your vision stick.

Taking Responsibility

When it comes to making your vision stick, here is the most important thing to remember: You are responsible . It is the leader’s responsibility to ensure that people understand and embrace the vision of the organization. We are all tempted at times to blame the people around us for their inability to understand and act on the vision we have cast. But when a leader blames the follower for not following, the leader has ceased to lead. If the followers don’t get it, we probably haven’t delivered the vision in a way that makes it get-able. We are responsible for keeping the vision of our organization at the forefront. It is up to each one of us to make sure there is alignment between the activity and the vision of our enterprise.

While in graduate school, I had a professor who was fond of saying, “If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.” The same could be said of leadership and casting vision. We are the keepers and purveyors of the vision. If the people around us don’t know where we are going, it’s because we haven’t made it clear. Instead of casting stones, we need to look in the mirror and ask ourselves: How can I make the vision clearer? Simpler?More accessible? What can I do to make it stick? How do I drive this vision down into every level of the organization?

Once you have settled the issue of responsibility, here are five things you can do to significantly increase the adhesiveness of your vision.

1. State the vision simply.

2. Cast the vision convincingly.

3. Repeat the vision regularly.

4. Celebrate the vision systematically.

5. Embrace the vision personally.

State the Vision Simply

First, if your vision is going to stick in people’s minds, it must be memorable.

I’ve talked to dozens of leaders who had an idea of what they wanted their organization to become, but it took them three paragraphs to explain it. They had a vision, but it wasn’t one they could communicate effectively. People don’t remember or embrace paragraphs. They remember and embrace sentences. As theologian Howard Hendricks said, “If it’s a mist in the pulpit, it’s a fog in the pew.” If your vision is unclear to you, it will never be clear to the people in your organization. For your vision to stick, you may need to clarify or simplify it.

When we launched North Point Community Church, our vision was “to create a church that unchurched people would love to attend.” For the theologically astute, a statement like that raises lots of questions. Admittedly, it is void of theological content. There’s nothing there about life change or salvation. The statement is incomplete. But if you wanted to know what we were about, that was it. We were committed to creating a church for the unchurched or, to use a phrase Bill Hybels coined, “irreligious people.” We were clear from the beginning that we were going after a different market than the average church. When people complained about what we did and didn’t do compared to the other churches they had attended, we simply shared our vision. That answered most of the questions. And our vision statement galvanized our leadership around what was distinctive about our organization.

As you evaluate your vision statement, remember this: It is better to have a vision statement that is incomplete and memorable than to have one that is complete and forgettable. As a leader, you have endless opportunities to define terms and expand on concepts for the people who are intrigued enough to ask questions and gather more information. But you have limited opportunities to cast your vision to the drive-by audience, the people who may never give you their undivided attention, much less a second chance. For that group you need a statement that will stick.

Another example of a memorable vision statement is this one from Internet giant eBay: “to provide a global trading platform where practically anyone can trade practically anything.” Note that the eBay vision statement doesn’t even mention the Internet. And there’s nothing in there about bidding on items. I don’t know anyone who has ever traded anything on eBay. They usually buy things. This statement doesn’t give you the full scope of what eBay is about. But it is intriguing and memorable. And for company insiders, the ones who are privy to the entire strategy, this simple statement is enough. It encapsulates pages of information and marketing strategies. More importantly, it summarizes the preferred future of the company.

Several years ago it occurred to the leadership team at North Point that we had accomplished what we had set out to do. We had successfully created a church that unchurched people loved to attend. By that time we had created a second and then a third campus modeled after the original church. All three have been successful at capturing the imaginations of unchurched people in their respective communities. Vision accomplished.

Our new vision revolves around connecting people into small groups. Our first vision statement said, “We envision fifty thousand people participating in weekly small groups that are committed to multiplying.” Even though we had reduced our vision to a sentence, it was not catchy or memorable. So our groups director, Bill Willits, went back to his team and brainstormed how to make the vision easier to communicate. They came back with this: 5/50/10.Our vision is five thousand groups with fifty thousand people by 2010. 5/50/10.

It’s been exciting to watch our various departments begin to reorganize around this new vision. One of the powerful things about a clearly articulated vision is that it has a way of redirecting the focus and resources within an organization. If the vision is too complicated for people to embrace, nothing changes.People tend to keep doing what they’ve always done the way they’ve always done it. Bottom line: to make vision stick, it needs to be easy to communicate.

Cast the Vision Convincingly

The second imperative to making vision stick is to cast it convincingly. Once you have your vision in a form that makes it easy to communicate, you must communicate it in a way that moves people to action. In this section I’m going to give you a simple formula that will help you communicate your vision convincingly. This is not original with me. I pulled it right out of the Old Testament from the book of Nehemiah.

Around 444 BC, a Jewish man named Nehemiah was charged with the task of rebuilding the wall around the city of Jerusalem after it had lain in ruins for over a hundred years. The Jews living in Jerusalem at the time were content to live with the broken-down wall. Nehemiah’s compelling vision for their future changed their attitude. In this short but highly effective speech to the Jews still living in Jerusalem, we find a brilliant model for casting a compelling vision. As you read, look for three things: He defined the problem that his vision addressed.

He offered a solution. Then he followed with the reason why something had to be done and why it had to be done immediately.

Then I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem lies in ruins, and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace.” I also told them about the gracious hand of my God upon me and what the king had said to me.

They replied, “Let us start rebuilding.” So they began this good work. (Nehemiah 2:17–18 NIV)

1. Define the problem

To cast a convincing vision, you have to define the problem that your vision addresses. For Nehemiah the problem was obvious. Jerusalem was in ruins! That was a problem for the Jewish people. But it wasn’t until he drew their attention to it and put forth a plan of action that they felt compelled to do something about it.

Every vision is a solution to a problem. If your vision doesn’t get traction, something that needs to happen won’t happen. A problem will continue to go unaddressed.To make your vision stick, your audience needs to understand what’s at stake. It’s the what’s at stake issue that grabs people’s hearts. Only a clear explanation of the problem will cause people to sit up and say, “Something must be done!” If your target audience doesn’t know what’s at stake, the vision will never stick.

So what problem does your vision propose to solve? Every successful organization—for profit or nonprofit—is viewed by its customers or clients as a solution to a problem. If you don’t believe me, Google “business solutions. ” You’ll get more than 440,000 results.Why? Because a business knows its future hinges on the perception that its product is a solution to someone’s problem. The same is true of your vision. Buy-in by others hinges on your ability to convince them that you are offering a solution to a problem they are convinced needs to be solved.

To cast your vision in a convincing manner, you need to be able to answer these two questions: What is the need or problem my vision addresses? and What will happen if those needs or problems continue to go unaddressed?

2. Offer a solution

Your vision is a solution to a problem. When you link a problem that people are convinced needs to be solved with a clear and compelling solution, you have the potential to capture their hearts. Nehemiah’s solution was pretty straightforward: “Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem.” Reconstructing the wall was the solution to a problem.

Perhaps you are familiar with the ONE campaign.ONE is an effort to rally Americans in the fight against global AIDS and extreme poverty. Its vision statement is as follows: “ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty History.” This is an example of rolling both the problem and the solution into the vision statement. The problems are AIDS and extreme poverty. The solution, or vision, is to eliminate both.

Perhaps you read that and wonder, “But how?Who? Where? What’s the plan?” Convincing vision statements never answer all those questions. That’s what websites, newsletters, and speeches are for. The vision statement simply states the solution to a problem. The ONE campaign aims to end AIDS and extreme poverty. To make your vision casting convincing, you have to present your vision as the solution to a problem. What solution are you proposing? How is your organization positioned as a solution to a problem?

3. Present a reason

The third component to a convincing vision is the reason something must be done now. You have to present people with a reason for your vision. You have to answer the questions: Why must we do this? Why must we do this now?

Nehemiah’s reason was wrapped up in this theologically pregnant phrase, “and we will no longer be in disgrace.” Space does not allow me to fully explain the significance of those eight words. The bottom line: the Jews knew that the city of Jer...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Leadership Library
• Making Vision Stick
• Taking Responsibility
• State the Vision Simply