Is It Time for an Organizational Vision Check?

From time to time, even leading-edge organizations find themselves with stagnant, ingrown environments impervious to innovation or with redundant and cumbersome systems. Many organizations come to a point where they find themselves experiencing frustration, risk aversion, mediocre performance, employee dissatisfaction, and low service responsiveness. Recently, a leader in a very large global organization reported to me what he is experiencing: lack of innovation, stagnancy, lack of direction, rampant internal conflicts, exceptionally poor morale, poor performance, and outdated processes. In discussing the issues with this leader over a period of weeks, our conversation went from change management, employee engagement, and innovation to something much closer to the core—the need to take another look at the vision of the organization and how it is communicated. The organization, in his opinion, did not have a clear sense of what it should be or how it should look 5 years into the future. The good news is that the negative symptoms his organization is experiencing, if strong enough, can create just enough positive dis-equilibrium to spawn innovation and can drive organizational improvement. In addressing the urgent challenges in the organization, it is tempting to address them tactically and in an action-oriented way with other types of organizational effectiveness efforts. However, the issues outlined above are strategic in nature, and their existence makes a case for revisiting or recreating a clear, organizational, strategic vision from which other strategies and tactics may flow in a unified way. You may need to do some tactical initiatives to “put out some fires,” but not to the omission of doing the tougher strategic work. Think of some of the most successful companies you hear about every day: Zappos, Amazon, Apple, Starbucks, etc. All of these and many others have a very clear sense of vision that even their customers can sense, and when it is time to revisit and re-emphasize the vision (as in the recent case of Starbucks), these winning companies understand the importance of the vision check.