When to use it
Use this tool to build your organization’s forward-thinking, high quality and practical vision.
What’s the purpose
A vision statement is the anchor of your project or organization and helps you set out what you would like to achieve and how you are going to get there.
How to do it
- Make sure to invite the right stakeholders into the process. You want to include anyone with decision-making power and have a diverse representation of voices to achieve a shared vision.
- Begin by defining design criteria that will help you keep your vision on track. With your team, brainstorm the ‘must haves’ (what your vision must include), ‘won’t haves’ (what your vision cannot include), ‘should haves’ (what would be nice to include) and ‘could haves’ (what can be included if necessary).
- Gather and review the key findings from your project and use them to answer the questions in step one, two and three.
- Start by answering individually the four questions.
- Then brainstorm individually options for your Mission, Vision and Core Values statements.
- Now as a team, share back and craft your final versions:
- Mission Statement: Live and breathe your organization’s mission. What are the overall purpose and objective?
- Vision Statement: Project yourself into what your organization hopes to achieve or become in the future. How would the world look if you accomplished your mission?
- Core Values: Your organization’s core values are the principles and ethics that guide decisions and actions at every level of the workforce. What does a good set of values look like?
- Finally in step four, this is the visual fun part when you design a visual to illustrate your vision as an ideal end state for your organization. There are many ways to do so: using the library icons to build little scenes, web search images to do collages or simple hand drawn icons. The aim is to combine text and images to have one big picture telling a story.
