I have been involved in countless efforts throughout my career in which various organizations needed to accomplish some fundamental change in their direction, positioning, or purpose. Such changes are rarely quick, easy, or successful the first time they are attempted. The reasons for this are many and varied: understanding the details of such changes is itself an incremental discovery process; the underlying organizations often have one or more cultures that actively resists these changes to varying degrees inter-organizational dynamics are often complex and not sufficiently understood; and finally, because communicating the nature of and approach to implementing such changes to those who need to make the changes is difficult and unreliable.

When I have seen such changes implemented successfully, it has usually been because the change management was performed in a disciplined manner. For this to be successful, these efforts often employ a tiered system of vision, strategy, and tactics which are defined, maintained, and evolved over time. This information is used as the basis for planning, integration, and accountability across the organization. Although this idea is frequently (and sometimes comically) followed across many businesses, in my experience, it is rarely done well. I believe one reason for this is that the underlying concepts and associated quality criteria for this information are themselves poorly understood and executed. This note attempts to establish a unified perspective on these elements, to improve this understanding, and thus enhance the ability to execute such an approach.

An organization's mission should communicate the fundamental purpose for that entity's existence, and the desired level of performance which the organization must achieve to be successful, both in the present and the future. As such, a mission should address:

1. The scope of the business
2. The unique competencies which differentiates the business from alternatives which its customers may chose
3. The values which it treasures above all others

An extensive summary of corporate mission statements can be found here. Some of my favorites are:

• Amazon.com: Be earth's most customer centric company; a place where people can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.
• Dell: Listen to customers and deliver innovative technology and services they trust and value.
• eBay: Pioneer communities built on commerce, sustained by trust, and inspired by opportunity.
• Facebook: Help people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers, through technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, and the digital mapping of people's real-world social connections.

Visions are distinct from missions, though the two concepts often are unfortunately often used interchangeably. Visions should be statements of what the organization and its customers aspire to be in the future. This progression from the current organization's mission should represent a credible transition over time; otherwise, the business purpose of the organization would not be sustainable as the vision was pursued. To be effective across this time horizon, a vision should meet all of the following criteria:

1. The vision should communicate a vivid, verifiable future state, in engaging language, that would represent the best collective outcome across all stakeholders.
2. The vision should be concise, attention-grabbing, and inspirational.
3. The vision should express tangible and realistic aspirations.
4. The vision should communicate helpful information to guide those involved in the required transformations, and enable decision-making and selection of the best possible strategies for the organization over time.

Chet Richards has described the classic pitfall which arises in expressing 'the vision thing': 

While a vision should be synthesized from many diverse inputs, it must ultimately emerge from the organization's leadership and the direction they chose to take the organization over time. For a comparative analysis of several visions for safety in transportation, see here. Here are some classic vision statements that have shaped the world we live in:

• Land a man on the moon and safely return him to earth by the end of this decade (NASA)
• Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful (Google)
• Contribute to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind (Apple)
• A personal computer in every home running our software (Microsoft)

Strategies are the means of pursuing an organization's vision across multiple planning cycles, and are discussed in more detail here and here. They should be built from many different sources and perspectives, though they ultimately must be integrated, made coherent, and be useful to guide multi-year planning efforts. Too often, strategies are fuzzy, fluffy, or just restate goals as objectives. Instead, the key characteristics of an effective set of strategies include:

• An explanation of the challenges which the organization must overcome, with a focus on the most critical elements.
• A crisp and coherent description of the overall approach that will be taken to confront these challenges, with particular attention on the choices that have been made, and a rationale behind these decisions.
• The specific steps that must be performed and orchestrated to support the selected approach.

Tactics are the collection of actions which, when supplied with an ordered allocation of resources, will achieve the desired strategic changes, and maximize the value of those resources and investments over time. Individual tactics are typically associated with objectives, which establish specific outcomes that are to be intentionally pursued by a particular action by a defined point in time. Once these objectives are accomplished, the associated resources can then be reallocated to other situations. These outcomes should be sufficiently detailed so that the duration and level of resources can be properly estimated and planned by the affected organizations.

Richards is again spot on about the common pitfalls of both strategies and tactics: 

The development of effective visions and strategies can generally only be crafted through patient, iterative, reflective considerations, and focused effort. Too often, vision and strategy updates instead are annual, last-minute exercises that are given little thought in advance, and then are set aside for most of the rest of the year in the face of urgent but less important priorities, and are not re-examined until the next annual cycle, or when convenient for some other purpose. While the use of strategic planning frameworks can be quite effective, these frameworks are not a goal unto themselves, but a means to certain ends, and these ends will only be achieved if adequate attention is put into developing the underlying concepts, routing around roadblocks, and aligning the strategies with behaviors and investments across the landscape they are relevant to.

Too often, as Richards warns, I've instead seen the expressions of vision and strategy become entrapped by rushed judgment, lukewarm consensus language, and ambiguous intentions. The resulting visions and strategies end up being expressed as buzzwords that don't facilitate the required decision-making or tradeoffs, and do not enable effective planning to be performed by independent actors over longer-term horizons. Effective strategic planning should instead provide clear direction across value streams, connect and coordinate teamwork, and balance risk and benefits over time.

A proven approach for maturing ideas expressed as high-level abstractions into actionable work consists of following these steps:

1. Form a team of subject matter experts across all stakeholders that will be responsible for implementation at the grass roots level. The selected individuals should be the key 'nodes' of trust within the organization who represent key points of view, and can help shape the opinions of the rest of the workforce through respect, rather than power.

2. Develop and reach agreement on the ground rules for producing implementation guidance with the sponsors of the effort

3. Recruit a small team to brainstorm an initial draft. This may be accomplished in separate exercises to brainstorm potential waypoints or alternative views for the journey, such as Where We Should Go, What We Must Accomplish, and How We Should Measure Success

4. Identify key phrases generated from these exercises

5. Solicit volunteers from the team to independently craft several alternative expressions of the deliverable using these key phrases as seed material. Make this a homework assignment, and distribute the results of this exercise to all participants before reassembling

6. Meeting again as a team to down-select the best from these alternatives. Strive for an ambitious, but realistic number of items that is appropriate for the target period of performance and capacity of the organization. Seek to build foundations for the future, rather than castles on sand that just provide vague expressions of notional goodness. Test for the obvious: ask if this idea were not on the list, would people choose to pursue it anyway?

7. Following this synthesis meeting, have a smaller team of volunteers serve as an editorial team which carefully refines the language of the selected material. Simplify and focus this material on the business purposes with greatest value for the organization. Consider other, useful formulations from unselected alternatives and incorporate these into the selected ideas if they add important elements. Ensure that the trust of the broader team is not violated by any actions taken by the editorial team.

8. Subject the proposed language to a peer review from the team, using a defined set of quality criteria (such as provided in this article), and address any issues which arise from that review.

9. Test out the resulting draft on an independent audience and validate that the material is useful and consistently interpreted. Re-assemble the editorial team to address any issues resulting from this independent review.

10. Submit the material to the appropriate authority for their final approval. Work with them to agree on a communications plan for flow-down of this information and explain how it is to be used by those organizations, and what responses from them are expected as a result of this information.

11. Collect feedback on the process and determine how to incorporate these lessons and any open issues into the next iteration of this material.

While these steps may seem quite involved, they are necessary to assure that ownership is established, and that the direction provided is useful, appropriately focused, and that accountability, linkage, and alignment can be accomplished across the organization, both horizontally and vertically.

Each of these elements - missions, visions, and strategies - have at there core the development and effective communications of abstract ideas, which are typically expressed in relatively short, prose statements. Once leadership consensus is achieved on these statements, only half the battle has been achieved. Rummler and Brache put their finger on the critical, and challenging work going forward from that point:

In our experience, the majority of the strategies that have never come to successful fruition have failed not because they lack a clear, viable vision; rather, they are gathering dust because they have been poorly implemented. Even the best strategies do not spontaneously guide performance. Comprehensive actions to implement a strategy must be planned, carried out, and monitored. Moreover, no matter how talented and hardworking they may be, top managers cannot implement a strategy by themselves.

The test of clarity of a vision and strategies can thus be accomplished by trying to use them in regular cycles of alignment and focus. These cycles of application must be accomplished early and often, and combined with feedback and clarifications, in order to converge on material that is proven effective in steering an organization over time to more favorable winds and currents for the benefit of all stakeholders.