A vision is not a strategy

A vision says where the business wants to be. A strategy says how it will get there and what it will give up on the way. The two are routinely confused, and the confusion runs one way: businesses that have written a vision believe they have written a strategy. They have written the first line of one.

"To be the leading provider of X in our region" is a vision. It is a perfectly good one. It answers none of the questions a strategy exists to answer. What problem are we solving? Which customers, and why will they choose us? What will we do first, and what will we not do?

The hierarchy, and its horizons

The confusion is easier to see when the layers are laid out with their time horizons.

A mission is the purpose: why the business exists. It has no end date and should never be outgrown.

A vision is what it looks like when the business has arrived: a picture of the future, less than a decade out, achievable within a leader's tenure.

Goals are the specific things to achieve in the next three to five years: financial, and also what the business becomes for its customers, its people and its community.

A strategy is the set of choices that gets from here to the goals: where to compete, how to win, what to build, what to stop.

Plans are this year's actions, owners and budgets.

Each layer is more precise and shorter-lived than the one above. The vision can be fuzzy; the plan cannot. A business that has a vision, goals and plans, and nothing in between, has a hole exactly where the choices should be. The plans fill it with whatever each function was already doing.

Why they get confused

Because the vision is the layer that gets the attention. It is written carefully, launched with care, printed on the wall. The strategy is a set of uncomfortable choices that offend someone in the room, so it gets softened until it reads like the vision again. After a few cycles, the document called Strategy contains a vision, some goals and a list of initiatives, and the choices have quietly gone.

And because a vision is what a strategy looks like from a distance. Seen from far enough away, two statements look alike. "Become the leader." And "concentrate on the two segments where our cost position wins, exit the third, and build a service capability to defend the first." Both are statements of direction. Only one of them can be argued with, and that is how you tell them apart.

Three tests

Hold the document up to three questions.

Does it say what the business will not do? A vision never does; a strategy always should. If nothing is ruled out, it is a vision however it is titled.

Could a competitor adopt it word for word? Most visions could be swapped between the top five businesses in a sector without anyone noticing. A strategy is specific to one business's position and could not.

Does the budget know about it? A vision changes nothing in the numbers. A strategy moves money and people, and the movement should be visible line by line.

What a vision is for

None of this makes the vision worthless. A shared aspiration does a job the strategy cannot. It gives the organisation a single objective that unites the themes. It tells people what the business is trying to become. And it stretches the ambition beyond what the current plan can see. The best ones combine an unreasonably demanding target with a purpose people can care about. A vision that every leader understands the same way and can retell is a genuine asset.

It is just not a strategy. It sits above one. The mistake is not writing the vision. The mistake is stopping there. The businesses that stop there are the ones where five leaders, asked what the strategy is, each recite the vision and then describe their own department's goals.

Keep the vision on the wall. Then write the strategy underneath it: the diagnosis, the choices, the things that will stop. It fits on a page, and it is the page most businesses have not written.

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